1943–present
Gretchen Albrecht
Gretchen Albrecht (born 1943) began with figurative work in which the protagonist was always a woman, often nude, and by the early 1970s had moved to abstraction, starting from the landscapes of Auckland’s West Coast. She is known for her semicircular canvases, the “Hemispheres”, first painted in Dunedin in 1981, and for her oval paintings. Since the 2000s she has also made oval metal sculptures.
Biography
In 1971 the Auckland Art Gallery showed the large abstract acrylic paintings of the American artist Morris Louis. By then Gretchen Albrecht was already painting with thinned acrylic on unprimed canvas, and the exhibition, by her own account, encouraged her to be bolder.
She was born on 7 May 1943 in Onehunga, a suburb of Auckland, the daughter of Reuben John and Joyce Winifred Fairburn Albrecht (née Grainger); she was the second child. She attended Mount Roskill Grammar School, then the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, and graduated in 1963 with honours in painting (according to other sources, in 1964). After that she studied until 1966 at the Auckland Secondary Teachers’ Training College, and from 1968 to 1971 she taught at Kelston Girls’ High School, then in 1972–1973 at the same School of Fine Arts. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1964 at the Ikon Gallery in Auckland; in the same year her work was selected for a show of contemporary New Zealand painting at the Auckland City Art Gallery. Her early pieces, both at art school and just after, are figurative: the protagonist is always a woman, and often a nude. The 1960s remained for her the most autobiographical period.
In the early 1970s she turned away from the human figure and took up landscape, her own garden, and arrangements of natural objects on coloured backgrounds. From 1970 she has painted with thinned acrylic instead of oil and left the canvas unprimed, so that the pigment soaks into the fabric like watercolour, which she loved. From then on there was more and more abstraction, though the starting point often remained studies from nature on Auckland’s West Coast and at Manukau Harbour. Her titles changed too: at first prosaic ones such as “Table-Cloth with Curtain”, then “Grey Ledge”, “Storm Swell”, “Penumbra”, “Fritillary”. The art historian Linda Gill observed that they had become as poetic as her colour.
In 1976, 1978 and 1986 she received grants from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. In 1978–1980 she designed sets for operas and ballets by Gillian Whitehead, and in 1988 for a production made in collaboration with the choreographer Douglas Wright.
After a year of travel in Europe and the United States, in 1980 she painted works that refer directly to European painting: “After Piero”, “Giotto’s Blue” and “Lunette (for Fra Angelico)”. Her mature style took shape at this time. In 1981–1982 Albrecht held the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago and lived in Dunedin. She arrived there with quadrants and in the studio put them together into a hemisphere: she wanted to break out of the rectangle and the square and introduce a curve. Later came oval canvases (the “Ovals”) and oval motifs on standard rectangular canvases (“Roses in the Snow”). In 1992 she said that the curved form had a sensuousness and a “female-relatedness” that the angular stretcher lacked. For a solo project at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1985 she made four works on the seasons and conceived the show as an environment: you enter the room, move along the walls and leave by the same door. The hemisphere occupied her for almost the whole decade. A series of collages made in 1987 and shown in 1988 recorded the disintegration of this form and the arrival of the oval. Critics have compared her to Mark Rothko and especially to Helen Frankenthaler; to my mind the comparison with Frankenthaler is the closer one, and it comes down to poured, spreading colour.
The survey exhibition “AFTERnature” (1986), organised by the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui, toured New Zealand, and Albrecht’s work was shown in New York, Chicago, in “Distance Looks Our Way” in Spain (1992–1993) and in other countries. Her solo projects include “Illuminations” at the Auckland Art Gallery (2002), “Returning” in Dunedin and Wellington (2005–2006), “A Luminous Shade” in Tauranga (2012) and “On Copper” in Auckland (2016). Since the early 2000s she has also made oval metal sculptures.
In 2000 she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to painting. Her work is held in all the major public collections in the country, including the Auckland Art Gallery, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Sarjeant Gallery and the University of Auckland. She now divides her time between Auckland and London.
Profile notes