Courtesy: the artist and Two Rooms, Auckland.

Gretchen Albrecht’s Lighting the Path brings together three paintings from her late 1970s Illuminations series, and four new works, from 2022 and 2023.

The Illuminations, though, look fresh and new too. Never previously exhibited, they manifest both obvious differences from, and commonalities with, the recent paintings. On one hand, they have a more spontaneous, improvised, impulsive look, bringing to mind sudden electrical discharges (whether in the sky or brain perhaps), in contrast to the relatively ordered, stable, harmonious compositions of 2022-2023. On the other hand, both sets of paintings embody that signature characteristic of Albrecht’s art, it’s resplendent and charged colour, the orchestrations of which – violets, reds, golden yellows, purples, umbers, black – ‘speak’, whether of inner emotion or our engagements with the natural world, or both simultaneously.

Opening Event: Thursday 16 November, 5.30 – 7.00pm.

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