Karen Gunderson, Nature and the Nature Of Royalty, Installation view, May 2022.
BORN IN WISCONSIN. LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK.
Karen Gunderson’s black paintings explore luminosity and push the limits of painterly gesture. Working exclusively in black oils, Gunderson focuses the act of painting on the relationship between brushstroke and light. “By using only blacks, I’m forcing the focus onto the brush strokes reflected by the light,” she says. “I paint a form, an image with black paint, and the light makes them visible, like magic.” Gunderson’s highly reflective surfaces cause the paintings to sparkle and shift as the viewer moves about the artwork.
Gunderson was born in Racine, Wisconsin in 1943 and earned her bachelor’s degree from Wisconsin State University, Whitewater. She earned both a Master of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in Painting and Intermedia, respectively. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions across the world, in places such as Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Spain, Togo, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Gunderson has received many honors and awards, most notably a Lorenzo Magnifico Prize in Painting at the 2001 Florence Biennale (Italy), and has been named by noted critic Donald Kuspit as one of the “New Old Masters.” In 2020, she received the international Anonymous Was A Woman award. After 40 years of living in New York City, she currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York.