PROVENANCE

A Corporate Collection

Gretchen Albrecht has an international reputation as one of New Zealand's most highly regarded painters. Her work is known for its geometry, an emotional use of colour and a constant evolution of influences, media and technique. Graduating with Honours from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1964, Albrecht taught for some years. In the late 1970s she took a 13 month trip to Europe and the United States, back in New Zealand she was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1981. During that year in Dunedin, Albrecht began working on the lunette shaped canvases which she calls Hemispheres. Her recent travels proved to be a catalyst, with European paintings and art history referenced in the titles of works such as Giotto's Blue and Lunette (for Fra Angelico). Of this time the artist says: I knew I wanted the hemisphere in 1981. I went to Dunedin with quadrants, the hemisphere happened in the studio, I put the quadrants together. I wanted to break out of the rectangle and the square and to introduce a curve. In 1989 Albrecht moulded the Hemispheres into the Oval of a map, allowing her to encompass a whole world containing East-West and North-South correlations and oppositions. Albrecht says: Ovals are a gentle shape, what happens in the top part could be reflected in the bottom half so I could have a continuous movement of paint, repetition and rhythm, spiralling, all en-circling, constantly in-flux which I like very much.

The 2002 retrospective exhibition of Albrecht's work held at the Auckland Art Gallery meet with great acclaim. Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the City Gallery, Wellington held a 2005 retrospective of Oval and Hemisphere paintings that same year, Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington exhibited paintings from the 1980s through to 2000 alongside Albrecht's recent stainless steel sculptures.
In 2009 Albrecht began working on a new series of rectangular paintings featuring oval shaped vortices of colour combined with slender horizontal geometric figures. The first of these paintings were exhibited in her exhibitions: Between Paint and Nature, Nadene Milne Gallery, Arrowtown and Rosea, Mark Hutchins Gallery, Wellington. 2010 saw Albrecht's solo exhibition, Roses in the Snow, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland. A further solo exhibition was held in 2014 at Two Rooms, Auckland. The paintings exhibited featured the three stretcher shapes of hemispheres, ovals and rectangles. With a career spanning five decades Gretchen Albrecht's work is held in the collections of Auckland Art Gallery,The Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, Tongarewa, the Gallery of New South Wales and the Newcastle Art Gallery, Australia.

Gretchen's painting takes the modernist exploration of colour and form and moves it to new contemporary levels. The forms on which she paints and the way in which paint is worked within the hemispheres, ovals and rectangular canvases are almost kinaesthetic - the paint carried by the movement of her body, the span of her arm. Her work is significant in many ways, redolent with meaning and deeply satisfying; an exploration of what colour can do and what it can mean. Acutely aware of the historical considerations that have challenged painters Giotto claimed human experience as a valid subject for art, her paintings are polyvalent, layered with meanings, yet individually rich unto themselves. Mary Kisler, Curator, Auckland Art Gallery.