Gretchen Albrecht is one of New Zealand's most celebrated
abstract artists and is widely known for her iconic hemispherical
and ovoid works. Her consistent use of these shapes as structural
boundaries in her career has allowed her the freedom to investigate
colour and gesture as a response to an aesthetic idea - often born
from an impulse, event or memory of things like the effect of a
stanza of poetry or the play of light on the black sand of Piha
beach.
Since 1965 her painterly technique has involved the application
of washes of thinned-down acrylic to un-primed canvas in a manner
akin to American post-abstractionists Helen
Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko. As a printmaker,
Albrecht transposes her painterly ideas to paper, often
allowing the mechanical nature of printmaking to dictate the
outcome of her works as much as her original intention directs
them.
Born in Onehunga, Auckland in 1943, Albrecht graduated from Elam
School of Fine Arts in 1963 and was awarded the Frances Hodgkins
Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1981. She has been
exhibiting in New Zealand and internationally for over 35 years and
was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002 for
her contribution to New Zealand painting.