Gretchen Albrecht

Fine Arts, Sydney is presenting an exhibition of work by Gretchen Albrecht.

Gretchen Albrecht has long been considered an eminent figure of abstract painting in Australasia. From the mid-1960s Albrecht’s work has made use of the material properties of paint, which from 1970 became increasingly characterised by the staining of unprimed canvas with washes of colour that ranged from deep saturation to thin translucency.

Through the decade of the 1970s Albrecht pursued an independent approach to abstract painting. Her work developed applications of colour that resonate formally, whilst bearing intentional yet oblique references, correspondences and resemblances to atmosphere, sea, sky, and landscape. Albrecht’s paintings have continued with her own distinctive form of ‘impure’ abstraction that is constructed from an experience of place, and is connotative of influences from the art historical canon, orders of architecture, and stories both ancient and modern.

This exhibition focuses on a painting from 1972 titled ‘Blazing Orange Sky’. The painting is exemplary of Albrecht’s work and is definitive of the period in its composition and arresting use of colour. Constructed in her studio from synthesised and cumulative sensations of land, sea, and skyscape, the painting features horizontal bands of rich colour stained into raw canvas. Closely held by the artist in her collection of her own work, this exhibition is the first occasion of this painting’s exhibition to a public audience.

Accompanying the painting are a series of gouaches dating from 2016. Painted a decade ago, and some decades hence of ‘Blazing Orange Sky’, they speak of the scale and style of gouaches painted en plein air by Albrecht through the decade of the 1970s, but with a compatible and similarly constructed and synthesised sense of atmosphere that recalls the process of that earlier and larger work. These works are also exhibited for the first time.

Gretchen Albrecht was born in 1943. She studied painting at Elam School of Fine Arts from 1960-1963. Albrecht’s first solo exhibition was in 1964, opened by Colin McCahon at the Ikon Gallery. In the six decades since, her paintings have featured in museum presentations and have been the subject of numerous solo, survey, and retrospective exhibitions at galleries and public institutions. She has lived and worked mainly in Auckland, New Zealand, and seasonally in London, United Kingdom.

For further information please contact the gallery directly: +61 (0) 2 9361 6200 / email@finearts.sydney