Gretchen Albrecht

Gretchen Albrecht was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1943 and graduated from the Auckland University School of Fine Arts in 1963. In 1981 she was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, Dunedin. She was also awarded grants from the QEII Arts Council 1976, 1978 and 1986. Albrecht has participated in many travelling group exhibitions, including NZ/NY (New York 1983), NZ Art Today (Chicago 1986), Distance Looks Our Way (Spain and the Netherlands 1993), and Reclaiming the Madonna (England). She has also had two solo exhibitions in London and a survey of her work curated by the Sarjeant Gallery of Wanganui, which toured New Zealand in 1986. Later, in 1998, the Sarjeant Gallery also curated a second Albrecht exhibition, ‘Crossing the Divide’, which explores the link between Gretchen’s prints and paintings. Highly regarded as a colourist, Albrecht continues to engage with abstraction in a personal and lyrical manner.

Gretchen’s ‘Four Colour Studies After Turner’ series done on a polymer plate, were inspired by her time in London exploring watercolours which she saw as luminescent, radiant and mysterious. Gretchen was introduced to a new (to her) print making technique using large sheets of polymer acetate. She has found this new process exhilarating which has allowed her to use the fluidity and ‘nature’ references of her 1970’s paintings, with the geometric interstices and multi-part paintings of her recent works, utilising a collaging technique that has always been part of her practice.