Gretchen Albrecht: Curves of Enclosure

In the late 1970s the rising generation of New Zealand artists assimilated abstract expressionism, picking up the momentum of Americans in mid- stride. The attraction was the abstract expressionists’ belief in (their) art’s access to invisible reality. Albrecht’s first mature works starting in the 1970s were poured acrylic stained abstractions of sunset landscapes. Colour-field paintings such as these were heralded as the next best thing after abstract expressionism, paint often poured dead flat they eschewed a hard-edged line, yet were redolent of landscape. Albrecht’s source has commonly – and perhaps mistakenly – been identified as Helen Fran- kenthaler, but she has declared in interviews that the work of Morris Louis was a more formative stimulus. In particular his Unfurled paintings, which she saw exhibited at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1971, where raw canvas duck was layered with broad runs of acrylic that coursed with gravitas in downward and inward channels. Acrylics, then a new medium in vogue, provided Albrecht with a palette of colours tending to the floricultural: smouldering orange, raspberry-red, parsley-green, plum, together with sun yellow and sky blue.

In crowded overlapping pourings they gave her compositions a flooded look; drooping cloud bellies evocative of the all-engulfing weather fronts that scud onto New Zealand’s West coast from the Tasman Sea. Evoked too are the cliffs and empty black sand beaches of Auckland’s Waitakere Ranges (Piha Karekare), Whatipu where the setting sun layers intense colours and rain advances in grey sheets. “I have always thought of myself as an abstract landscape painter,” Albrecht admits. Take Cloud over Whatipu (1976), a swarm of piquant, fugitive notes falling like spontaneously dropped sheets of paper, each cradled element has a hovering yet sagging weight achieved by the relative densities and contrasts of colour, diaphanous but intensely built up. Albrecht can make tinges of pink seem to exude a heavy brooding presence and cause a normally ominous purple-black to levitate. The lightness, delicacy and poetry of these poured forms was on Albrecht’s part, perhaps, a conscious reaction to the lurid, masculine styles of – in the New Zealand context – more expressionist painters.

Throughout the 1980s Albrecht fashioned shaped canvas forms – hemispheres and ovals – that she then worked on with arcing brushstrokes of often vibrant colour. Albrecht created her first hemisphere paintings in 1981. Like the large landscapes of the 1970s, the hemispheres were floor works, first produced on the studio boards during a year-long Frances Hodgkins residency in Dunedin. Initially each hemisphere was composed of two stretched canvases made into quadrants and bolted together, later she employed a full hemispherical stretcher. Working in acrylics, Albrecht applied paint directly onto the canvas, allowing the pigment to seep into the fabric, building up rich layers of colour in wide sweeping movements. The first canvases were the width of her arm span. She has described the dis- tinctive hemisphere as “a shape I could put my voice into”.

The hemisphere paintings vary from bright to crepuscular in tone, from crisply limned to illegibly blurred, and in texture from creamy to black sandy grit. They feel monumental in part because of the objectness of their support. The hemisphere form was succeeded by the oval, a geometric form that also assisted the swirled pleasures of the brushed and squeegeed colour. Albrecht’s robust washes of acrylic were now superimposed with horizontal bands of oil paint mixed with wax. In Claritas (blind angel) (2001), circular white acrylic wisps are overlaid with centred horizontal strips of white and black that stand out geometrically, declaring a distinct wariness of the arbitrary.