Gretchen Albrecht

Fine Arts, Sydney is presenting an exhibition of paintings by Gretchen Albrecht.

The exhibition comprises two of Albrecht’s earliest ‘hemisphere’ paintings, dating from 1981 and 1982. This is the first public viewing of these paintings since they were made and last exhibited 38 and 36 years ago respectively.

Gretchen Albrecht has been considered amongst the eminent figures of abstract painting in Australasia for her work since the 1970s. From the mid-1960s Albrecht’s work made use of the properties of acrylic paints, which from 1970 was characterised by the staining of unprimed canvas with flat washes of colour that ranged from deep saturation to thin translucency. Throughout the decade of the 1970s, Albrecht pursued an independent approach to abstract painting with freely-worked loose horizontal bands of colour that can be seen formally, but also with oblique references, correspondences and resemblances to her compositions’ basis in the experience of ocean, sky, and landscape. Albrecht’s mature style and her adoption of the ‘hemisphere’ format of shaped canvases consolidated in 1981 during her time as Frances Hodgkins Fellow at Otago University, Dunedin, following a period in Europe and North America. Albrecht’s ‘hemispheres’ consist of two quadrant-shaped canvases, butted together in an upright semicircle, with some later ‘hemispheres’ consisting of a single semicircular canvas. In the earliest ‘hemispheres’, each quadrant is evidently worked in arcs of deeply saturated single colours that contrast vividly with those of their counterparts. 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 and orders of architecture, poetry, theology, and mythology.

In this exhibition, the painting ‘Reveal’ is of the original body of Albrecht’s ‘hemispheres’, made and exhibited during the time of her Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1981. The painting comprises two quadrants, each painted in solid and intensely contrasting bright red and yellow colours. The larger painting ‘Seraf’ was made in early 1982, and is from Albrecht’s second body of ‘hemispheres’. ‘Seraf’ comprises two quadrants, each painted in solid and intensely contrasting bright yellow and deep blue colours. ‘Seraf’ was exhibited in the exhibition ‘Seven Painters / The Eighties’, which toured New Zealand at Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Auckland City Art Gallery, and the National Art Gallery, Wellington from 1982-1983.

Gretchen Albrecht was born in 1943 in Auckland, New Zealand, and studied painting at University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts from 1960-1963. Albrecht’s first solo exhibition was opened by Colin McCahon at Ikon Gallery, Auckland, in 1964, and her paintings have been included in museum and institutional exhibitions since that date. Her first solo exhibition in Sydney was held in 1970. Albrecht’s paintings were first surveyed in 1986 in the solo exhibition ‘Afternature – a survey’ at Sarjeant Gallery, where a second solo survey exhibition ‘Crossing the Divide: a painter makes prints; a survey of graphic work 1964 – 1999’ was held in 1999. A two-decade period of Albrecht’s ‘hemisphere’ and ‘oval’ paintings were the subject of the solo survey exhibition, ‘Illuminations’, at Auckland Art Gallery in 2002. In 2005 a second solo survey exhibition focusing on her ‘hemisphere’ and ‘oval’ paintings, ‘Returning’, toured Dunedin Public Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington. A new monograph dedicated to surveying Albrecht’s work from 1963-present will be published in early 2019 by Massey University Press.

Gretchen Albrecht lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand, and London, United Kingdom.

1 March — 18 April, 2019