Gretchen Albrecht
Gretchen Albrecht is an eminent New Zealand abstract painter and sculptor who has exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally for over five decades. Her work is held in major Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian public collections, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Waikato Museum; the University of Auckland; and Victoria University of Wellington. In 2000 Albrecht was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting.
There have been several major survey exhibitions of Gretchen Albrecht’s work, including most recently Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery's Liquid States (2024), which examined Albrecht's paintings, watercolours, collages, and drawings from the 1970s and 1980s; Returning, Dunedin Art Gallery (2005); Gretchen Albrecht: Illuminations, Auckland Art Gallery (2002); and AFTERnature, Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, (1986). Her paintings were exhibited in Valencia, Spain as part of the exhibition Ultramarte at the Casa Museo Benlliure in 2007, and in the group exhibition Diaspora: Pluralism and Singularity which toured New Zealand in 2010-11.
She is the subject of several major publications, including exhibition publication Gretchen Albrecht: Liquid States (2024), the monograph Between Gesture and Geometry, by Luke Smythe (2019) and reprinted 2023; and Colloquy: Three Essays, edited by James Ross with essays by Colm Tóibín, Linda Gill and Mary Kisler (2015).
Since the 1970s, Albrecht's work has evolved from the poured acrylic 'stained canvases' for which she first gained widespread recognition, into a pair of signature 'shaped-canvas' formats: the hemisphere (half circle) & the oval. These are shapes that Albrecht associates with particular meanings & states of mind. In the shaped-canvas paintings she has been producing since the early 1980s, resonant combinations of colour and geometry create images with a clear poetic impulse, in which references to landscape, family and the cosmos act as emotional points of departure.
Since 2000 Albrecht's artistic horizons have broadened to encompass large-scale stainless steel sculpture and have witnessed the inception of a series of multi-panelled rectangular paintings featuring an inner rectangular ‘threshold' motif. In 2009 Albrecht began working on a new series of rectangular paintings featuring oval-shaped vortices of colour combined with slender horizontal geometric figures.
In 2014 Albrecht had her first solo exhibition with Two Rooms, Auckland. The paintings exhibited utilised the three stretcher shapes of hemispheres, ovals and rectangles and ranged in scale from the intimate hemispheres on copper, to ovals and very large scale rectangles on canvas.
Albrecht continues to develop her ideas using the three painting-stretcher shapes of hemisphere, oval and rectangle.
