PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Christchurch

LITERATURE
James Ross (ed), AFTERnature: Gretchen Albrecht: A Survey - 23 Years, (Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, 1986)

EXHIBITED
Sue Crockford Gallery, Inaugural Exhibition of Sue Crockford Gallery, Albert Street, 1985

ILLUSTRATED
Art New Zealand (No.189 / Spring 2023) p.45

Gretchen Albrecht's Lunette/Silken is a significant and definitive hemisphere painting within this artist's oeuvre. Completed in 1984, this painting represents a crucial juncture where the artist freed herself from references to the outside world and recognizable subject matter. From here on in the only footholds to possible meaning and intention the artist would provide her audience would come via increasingly oblique and often abstruse titling. With the abandonment of recognisable subject matter came a heightened and more sophisticated use of colour and chromatic relations as well as a greater luminosity. These surface qualities were also enhanced by the increasing availability of acrylic paint which fundamentally changed the nature of the artist's painting; its inherent plasticity allowing her to work more quickly and to manoeuvre the paint around the surface in a more aggressive fashion. The vibrancy and intensity of the colours was also much greater with the new water-based paints and when applied to unprimed canvas they would stain into the weave of the canvases creating the lucidity and ethereal beauty which is the paramount hallmark of Albrecht's work. Completed in 1984, Lunette/Silkin represents a significant shift in a term coined by Francis Pound, the 'central hinge' (where the two quadrants meet) was to become an intensely positive force in Albrecht's hemispheres over the course of 1984, with works increasingly becoming more assertive. "The emphatically visible curves of colour around [Albrecht's] hemispheres, from 1981 to 1986, those parallel curves which agitate so repeatedly their surface, serve not only to dramatize the act of painting - to show the sweep of the artist's arm: they serve also to illuminate the structure of the hemispheric form itself." (F Pound, 1986). In Lunette/Silken the dialogue and division between the left and right quadrant is made explicit through the abruptly contrasting pigments. Like all of the hemispheres, at the heart of this painting is a conversation about duality, pairings and polarities, both real and of the heart and mind. Here the dialogue between left and right is crucial. A lunette is a semi-circular space in a classical building and in Lunette/Silken the artist aptly displays her unique ability to speak with both colour and shape in an idiosyncratic and uniquely original voice. Lunette/Silken is just one of three paintings across Albrecht's entire oeuvre to explicitly cite 'Lunette' in the artwork title.