Books
Gretchen Albrecht
Between Gesture and Geometry

Written by Luke Smyth, ‘Between Gesture and Geometry’ comprehensively surveys Gretchen Albrecht’s work and positions her amid key developments in Australasian art history since the 1960s and argues for her work’s international significance on the basis of its distinctive engagement with shaped canvas painting. Albrecht is best-known for two series of shaped canvasses, which she developed in the 1980s and continues to elaborate today: the ovals and the hemispheres. By imbuing these two forms with a rich array of connotative meanings, Albrecht moved shaped canvas painting away from its formalist roots in postwar American art. In so doing, she pushed a genre that had been synonymous with formal purity and the reductionist pursuit of painting’s essence in the direction of a compelling and expansive impurity. The book traces the evolution of both series and sets them within the broader context of Albrecht’s sixty year career, which encompasses several other noted painting series and engagements with other media. From this new account of her work’s development, Albrecht emerges as a pivotal figure in recent New Zealand art history. In addition to helping end the dominance of landscape painting in the country and pioneering a postmodern approach to abstraction, she established herself as a respected and successful female artist at a time when the local art world offered few opportunities to women.

Dr Luke Smythe is a lecturer in art history, art theory and curatorship in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne.