Gretchen Albrecht

Fine Arts Sydney is presenting a solo exhibition of paintings by Gretchen Albrecht.

This exhibition focuses on three never-before-exhibited paintings that date from the early 1990s and early 2000s. Each is of Albrecht’s distinctive ‘hemisphere’ format of semicircular shaped canvases with gestural application of paint to raw surfaces.

The largest of these paintings, ‘Furia’ (2003), is formed from two adjacent quadrants of unprimed canvas with bold and energetic arcs of rich black paint stained into and upon its surface. ‘After “Storm”’ (2003) is a single semicircular shaped canvas, physically undivided but split visually into contrasting black and white quadrants of paint on raw linen. A smaller painting, ‘Study No. 8 for “Ashes”’ (1992) is a shaped canvas of two adjoining monochromatic quadrants applied respectively with white and black paint in fluid and arcing gestures.

This exhibition also presents a number of intimately scaled new works: semicircular shaped panels of copper, combining the surface of this warm metal with thick gestural applications of oil paint and patina.

Gretchen Albrecht has long been considered an eminent figure of abstract painting in Australasia. From the mid-1960s Albrecht’s work has made use of the material properties of paint, which from 1970 became increasingly characterised by the staining of unprimed canvas with washes of colour that ranged from deep saturation to thin translucency. Through the decade of the 1970s Albrecht pursued an independent approach to abstract painting. Her work developed loosely-worked applications of colour that resonate in discretely formal terms, whilst at the same time bearing intentional yet oblique references, correspondences and resemblances to the experience of sea, sky, and landscape. The consolidation of Albrecht’s mature style and adoption of her now-almost-definitive format of shaped canvases occurred during her 1981 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship after a year-long sabbatical in Europe and North America. Many of Albrecht’s ‘hemispheres’ consist of two quadrant-shaped canvases butted together in an upright semicircle, with others consisting of an undivided semicircular canvas surface. The shape of each half-circle or quadrant is worked in broad arcs of saturated pigment, setting up vivid contrasts and foregrounding of the traces of gestural painterly action. For Albrecht, the hemisphere has come to represent a distinctive form for her own ‘impure’ abstraction that is connotative of influences from the art historical canon, orders of architecture, and stories of the ancient and modern.

Gretchen Albrecht was born in 1943. She studied painting at Elam School of Fine Arts from 1960-1963. Albrecht’s first solo exhibition was in 1964, opened by Colin McCahon at the Ikon Gallery. In the six decades since, her paintings have featured in museum presentations and have been the subject of numerous solo, survey, and retrospective exhibitions at galleries and public institutions. She has lived and worked mainly in Auckland, New Zealand, and seasonally in London, United Kingdom.

This is the second exhibition of Albrecht’s work to be presented by Fine Arts, Sydney, and follows the gallery’s presentation of select paintings from the early 1980s held in 2019.

For further information please contact the gallery directly.