PROVENANCE Private Collection, Hamilton Acquired from Nadene Milne Gallery, 2016

EXHIBITED Swimming Into Darkness - New Paintings by Gretchen Albrecht, Nadene Milne Gallery, April 16 - May 7, 2015

After early figurative and expressionist works, Gretchen Albrecht turned to painting still-life compositions, before coming into her own as a robust colourist with a major series of large-scale landscapes in the mid-1970s. A 1971 exhibition by American Colour Field painter, Morris Louis at Auckland Art Gallery, intensified her interest in the psychological and expressive effects of the use of flat areas of colour in painting.

The swirling worlds of luminous colour that define her mature work unfurl in a delicately poetic dance, conveying the power and the beauty of nature with a degree of intimacy that resonates within the viewer.

Solid, rectilinear bands of colour create spatial depth and contrast geometry with gesture - alluding to a conversation between impulse and intent. In her ambition to render the world in terms of its emotional appearance, Albrecht has infused the potency of experience into an aesthetic that is now one of the most widely recognized in New Zealand. Her images often have a stark beauty, but they are not simple. They are aware of history, of art history, as much as they are aware of the world unmediated by art.