View PDF - Albrecht, Gretchen

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ACKN O\7LE DGEM ENT S
The author gratefully acknowledges the following for permission to use
their material in this book:
Janet Frame and Curtis Brown Pty Ld forJanet Frame's poem'summer'.
Bloodaxe Books for Fleur Adcock's poem Hospw,1986.
This publication has been supported by the Visual Arts
Publication Programme of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts
Council of New Zealand.
RANDOM CENTURY NEW ZEALAND LID
(An imprint of the Random Century Group)
18 Poland Road
Glenfield
. Auckland 10
NE\r ZEALAND
Associated companies,' branches and representatives
throughout the world
Firsr published 1991
Text @ Linda Gill; Illustrations @ Gretchen Albrecht
rsBN 1 86941 134X
Design and production by Richard King
Typeset by Computype Auckland Ltd
Printed in Singapore
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, storage in any information retrieval
system or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

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WIZZO THE MAGICIAN
1963
Oil on canvas, 990x1175 mm
Collection of Auckland City Art Gallery

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Twenty.six years later, in 1990, the poet Fleur
Adcock selected Albrecht's Stranger GreetingMother and
Child for the cover of Time Zones, a collection of her
poetry. The work, Adcock felt, expressed her own
remembered emotions as a young morher dealing with
the anguish of separation from her child. For other
women, the same painting has summed up the protective
anxieties a morher feels, but also has within it the
possibility that the stranger may be a friend. A young
woman studying Albrecht at universiry in 1990 found a
different meaning in the painting. For her, the morher's
features are Polynesian, her skin dark, the hills behlnd
speak of New Zealand. The mother and child are Maori
and symbolise the people of the land - rhe stranger
with his sprig of olive threatens more than the loss of a
child. Albrecht agrees that she had looked at Polynesian
features in shaping a face that was to be both her own
and something more and different, but she did not have,
in 1964, the political consciousness of students brought
up during the last two decades. The mythological shape
she has given to her own predicament may well have far
wider implications.
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
Srranger GreetingMother and Child, 1964
12
The three decades of Albrecht's painting life so far,
the 1960s, '70s and'80s, have each produced characteristic
forms. These forms can be seen as containers. The
container fills, overflows, re.fills, and finally changes.
The mythological forms, the masked, ambivalent figures
of her studenr years, together with other experimental
uses of the figure in the years that followed, made way
for something different.
By the early 1970s the human figure had disappeared
and she was dealing only with the world of nature
(unmediated by wizards or witches). At an exhibition in
Sydney in 1970 she showed what she titled Tablecloth
paintings, large abstracted images of foliage and vegetables
viewed from directly above so that the whole of the
canvas is the tabiecloth. Since then her work has
become increasingly abstract, increasingly focused on
colour, shape and two-dimensionality. These are rhe elements
of rhe painrer's vocabulary, though in Albrecht,s
case the medium does not have to be paint; she has
made important statements in fabric.
Albrecht's change from figuration was partly a
response to the primacy of abstraction in the art of the

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GARDEN (5)
1971
Acrylic on canvas, 1550x1220 mm
Collecrion of rhe arri.t

abstraction by the Americans Kenneth Noland and
Frank Stella. And then one must enlarge upon rhe linear
methods of art history which take no account of the diffuse,
spiralling processes that go on within the practising
artist.
One has said very little about what goes on in an
Albrecht painting by tracing a f'ew obvious antecedents.
When asked about the meaning of his paintings Frank
Stella replied, ''W'hat you see is what you see.' Even in
her most austerely geometrical canvases, such as Vicnry
(page Z7), Albrecht's intentions have never been purely
formal. Her shapes and marks have always stood for
something as well as being themselves, and she has
encouraged every kind of reading from the mundane to
the spiritual. Nor has there been the subordinarion ro
material implicit in Pollock's flung and splattered painr,
though Albrecht, like him, works on the floor most of
the time and allows some freedom to her paint as it is
laid down on the canvas. Frankenthaler's technique of
pouring thinned paint into the weave of unprimed canvas
was helpful for Albrecht's large landscape-based
paintings of the mid-1970s. Whereas Frankenthaler
allowed maximum room for accidental events, choosing
titles and shaping her work according to what was suggested
by the configurations of paint, Albrecht began
with a specific landscape idea and a definite format. The
technique appealed to Albrecht because it allowed a
generous bodily involvement with the act of painting.
At this time she was enlarging her scale, learning to
work to the full extent of the body and the reach of the
arm, and the canvases were nearly two metres high or
two metres wide. In addition the technique was similar
to that of laying down washes with watercolour, a
favourite medium. Albrecht enjoyed using the newly
developed acrylic paint, which, like watercolour, can be
applied in quick.drying transparent washes.
A11 Albrecht's work at this time is about her
response to known places in Auckland. The paintings
begin in 1971 in the garden with a foreground of vegetation.
Here a curving green stroke is a frond in its springing
arc of growth, and a few of these strokes stand for
burgeoning plant life. Japanese painters, after prolonged
meditation on leaves and twigs, make marks of this kind,
marks that enact what they portray. The paintings are
full of movement, up and down the overlapping bands of
colour, and in and out, as one area of colour recedes or
advances when placed beside another.
For the next longer sequence of paintings, which
were to occupy her from 1972 to 1976, Albrecht tumed
her attention to that mosr rypical New Zealand site -
the meeting place of sea and land.
In 1972 Albrecht moved to a house in Titirangi, a
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
16
bush-covered suburb on the outskirts of Auckland, leading
immediately into the wilderness of the Waitakere
Ranges and, beyond, to the cliffs and empty black-sand
beaches of the west coast. She went to those beaches, to
Karekare and Whatipu, often at the end of the day,
when the colours were most intense and the setting sun
made spectacular layerings in the clouds. She made
quick watercolour sketches and later worked them up in
her studio into large abstracted sweeps and strokes and
bellyings ofcolour that convey the physical sensation of
the expanse of land, sea and sky. The paint seems to
swell and flow out beyond the boundaries of the frame,
suggesting limitless horizons and a sense of the numinous.
The glorious colouq often with strong contrasts
between dark and lighr, conveys an inrense emotional
response to the forbidding beauty of the west coasr, an
area of luxuriant semitropical forest, exposed to the prevailing
winds and storms that sweep in unimpeded over
the Thsman Sea. Seen from the perspective of the 1990s,
these paintings look less abstract than when Albrecht
painted them, more tied to the particularities of
Auckland and New Zealand. The high colour, the large
scale are a response to this country as a small island set
in an immense expanse of water. The paintings seem
more about the west coast, where the rain falls and the
sun sets, than the east, with its outlying islands and gentler
colours. The broad strokes in the garden paintings
suggest the lush vegetation of Auckland - 6ns szn'1
imagine an English or even a South Island painter arriving
at such marks.
Language, verbal or visual, does not describe a pre.
existent fixed reality, but is part of the process that magically
creates reality. Albrecht's work is a deepening
consideration of every aspect of her chosen language,
and she creates her reality as she goes along. Her marks
are like nouns, adjectives and verbs, making visual
poetry to set beside that of other poets:
Nothing is so beautiful as spring -
'When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like hghtnings to hear him sing;
The glassy pearffee leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
\7ith richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
\7hat is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden . . .
-G.
M. Hopkins,
SPnns

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studio onto the painter May Smith's house in Epsom,
and one night he took me to meet her. I can remember
very clearly standing at the front door with Dad and
being taken in to look at her studio, thinking that this
is the first real artist I've ever met - this diminutive
dark-haired woman - and feeling that same sense of
there being some magic, some mysterious revelation
contained in the room, just as I had felt when I first
went into the art room at school.
At secondary school the talent that had expressed
itself only in fabric blossomed in the stimulating envi'
ronment created by her teacher Colin de Luca.
Believing that talent needed to be fed by a wide range of
experience and knowledge, he developed a course that
included art history as well as the usual disciplines, and
from the beginning introduced his students to the best
modem artists. He has clear recollections of Albrecht, of
her energy, her passionate dedication to art, her constant
challenge -'\Uhy are we doing this work?' Albrecht's
sixth form year was a full-time art course under this sym'
pathetic teacher, preparing for entry to art school.
Albrecht started at Elam Art School in 1960 just
before her seventeenth birthday. There she encountered
traditional drawing from the plaster cast, a strong aca'
demic discipline, which 'we thought terribly boring and
out of touch with modem times',
I have a vivid image in my mind of an obsessed, scarlet-faced
Mr Mclaren, sharpening his 48 pencil and
reducing naked women models to an articulated series
of tin cans - a kind of weird late cubism via the Slade;
of Garth Tapper enthusiastically sending us along
Karangahape Road with money from the kitty to buy
huge snappers, eels and fruit for the Tiresday still-life
painting class; of Ida Eise admonishing me for not getting
the last milligram of paint out of the tube, and
showing me how by dropping a spent tube of Terre
Verte onto the floor, then stamping her neatly laced.
up black-booted foot on top of it to produce an arching
spurt of paint that landed directly onto my palette
-
such an elegant, aggressive but unexpectedly exciting
gesture; and Louise Henderson, with her French
accent, urging us on to 'use more colour, be more bold'
- all rather vague and undirected but to our young
eyes and ears so'forelgn', so'continental'.
It was important for Albrecht that out of a painting
staff of six lecturers, three were women. 'The point was
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
20
not whether the women were good or indifferent as
teachers, but that they were there, and we took it all for
granted as a perfectly normal state of affairs.'
In the second year Jim Allen's drawing classes were
very important to her. 'He encouraged blg bold confident
drawings. We cut off large sheets of paper and
worked on table tops in black paint with big brushes. It
liberated my painting.' Colin de Luca commented that
Jim Allen encouraged Albrecht to 'discharge the great
energy and knowledge she had pent up in her'. There
has been a continuing 'drawn' element in Albrecht's
work, a periodic retum to the use of line and working on
paper.
On the staff at Elam were two newly arrived
American art history lecturers, Kurt von Meier and
Arthur Lawrence, who had a profound influence on
Albrecht. Von Meier introduced her to women artists
not generally known about in New Zealand at that time:
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Miinter, Kathe
Kollwitz, Sonia Delaunay. He also drew Albrecht's
attention to New Zealand's women painters, particularly
Frances Hodgkins, whose Sel/ Portrait - Still Life tn the
Auckland City Art Gallery was revelatory: 'lt showed
me how one could use metaphor in painting -
Hodgkins's assemblage of personal objects, massed
together in a solid tablet of paint strokes speaking so eloquently
of herself.' From Arthur Lawrence she learned
that 'our inheritance as artists and scholars was not to be
confined only to local, regional or national concerns but
was inextricably bound up with the rest of the world'.
Lawrence's enthusiasm for the Romanesque and for
Italian Renaissance painting was another important
influence on Albrecht that was to become visible only
later in her career.
In May 1964 Albrecht graduated with honours in
painting and an award as the most distinguished student
in the faculty. There followed two years at home with
her small son, and the decision to train as a teacher.
Going to Training College in 1966 was veqy good
because I met ex-art school people there like Dick
Frrzzell, \Tarren Viscoe, Diana Halstead, Rodney
Wilson, a whole group of people fresh out of art school,
and I was able to plug into the kind of continuum they
represented. It had the same spirit of youthful aspira'
tion and a sense of purpose that art school had for me
- the same intensity.
It encouraged me to keep on with my personal work,
which had got buried. I really enjoyed teaching too.

MARINE SKY (SUNSET)
197 5
Acrylic on canvas, 1770x 1680 mm
Collection of Erika and Robin Congreve

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SENTINEL
1980
Acrylic on canvas, 1530x1370 mm
Collection of Jenny and Alan Gibbs

Lament, 1987
Restraint, inwardness, calm and quiet. An artist
deliberately sacrificing some values in order to move on.
Sacrifice of this sort has been the mark of all moves
towards a new order, whether in the work of an individual
artist like Albrecht or in the broader development of
painting. Leo Steinberg relates that when Georges
Braque first saw Picasso's Demoiselles d'Auignon in 1907,
he said: 'lt is as though we were supposed to exchange
our usual diet for one of tow and paraffin.' After that first
sense of loss, Braque quickly came to see the value of the
new diet, to the point where the old was no longer of
sustenance to him as an artist, and l-re shared with
Picasso the exploration of the new way of depicting
shape and space that the Demoiselles had opened up.
In 1981 Albrecht hung two identical fan-shaped
canvases separately, one above the other, so that the
lower image is a reversed reflection of the one above.
This was l-ament, an eloquent black painting, the clearcut
shapes looking like musical notation on the wall. It
was quickly followed by Chant, a red painting but in
every other way a mirror image of Lament. Albrecht
spoke at this time of her 'binary obsessions', a preoccupa'
tion with duality, with symmetry in the widest sense of
arranging two halves in such a way that each is felt to
balance the other. This may be between halves that are
identical or there may be a more subtle measuring of the
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
2B
Chant, 19il,
values of colour and shape and the creation of unexpected
and risky oppositions.
Albrecht was extending her meditation on nature
beyond its proliferating abundance of forms and looking
at its underlying rhythms, the alternations of dark and
light, night and day, summer and winter, growth and
decay. And there are other more lasting dualities - left
and right, male and female, organic and inorganic, solid
and liquid. And others involving moral values - good
and evil, love and hatred, pleasure and pain. She was
reaching into a treasury of metaphor, exploring the way
the human mind structures its experience of the world.
And questioning the truth of these structures, seeking
some kind of reconciliation, a truth beyond duality.
In the Epilogue to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her
monumental work on Yugoslavia, Rebecca West wrote:
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure
and the ionger day of happiness, wants to live to our
nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that
shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of
us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the
agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and
wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to
its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its
blackened foundations.
*

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During i9B1 Albrecht found a way ro embody her
thoughts when she bolted two large quadrants together
into a semicircle. One quadrant she painted deep purpleblue,
the other scarlet. The painting was called Cardinal,
a reference to the church dignitary with his ceremonial
vestments of purple and scarlet - the semicircle suggesting
a priestly cope. Francis Pound, discussing this painting
in 1986, pointed out thar the root of the rvord
'cardinal' comes from Latrn cardo, cardinalis, a hinge.
!7ith its two joined halves the work is, in a sense,
hinged, and it is indeed a 'hinge' work, of cardinal
importance in Albrecht's development. All her work of
FOU R
Hemispheres
As Frances Hodgkins Fellow at Otago University, 1981,
with Possess, one of the first hemispheres
32
the 1980s has made reference to the idea of two halves
side by side. Most of it has been contained within a
semicircle.
As with the large landscapes of the 1970s, the scaie
of the paintings is determined by the body. Albrecht
continued to work on the floor, leaning over the canvas
u'ith her arm extended, sweeping acrylic paint on with a
squeegie. Eventually the range of implements increased
to include mops and brushes. Most of the srrokes, especially
at first, echoed and reinforced the curve of the
canvas. Later, she brought in vertical marks, using oil
paint on top of the acrylic ground. The vertical strokes

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OF MYST AND \TATERE
1986
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 1530x3060 mm
Collection of the artist
I

fql'sntod touches, smudges and strokes of paint conrwthe
iryuession of things seen dimly as through a veil
Cmist rrr reflected in the broken surface of a pool.
Lrnderuorld (page 39) is another hemisphere with a
rurg central image dividing right from left. The thlck
t.lue strokes of paint suggest something watery shooting
r+ like a tree, a fountain perhaps, or a geyser. Albrecht
fid a number of paintings at this time, 1988, that refer to
namral energies, the volcanic thrust of steam or magma
trp through the earth's crust, the plunge of water over
precipice. New Zealanders live close to these forces, and
retuming to New Zealand after experiencing different
topographies made Albrecht sharply aware of her own
country's uniqueness, what she called the 'sensuous violence
of the landscape'. The 'underworld' of the title is
the seething core of the earth suggested by the fiery reds
and yellows of the left-hand side. The liquids of the
'overworld' are the watery blues and greens of the right
half. The usual meaning of underworld, the land the
Ancients envisaged as the deathly mirror of life on
earth, is also present in the title, and one journeys in the
painting from one to the other - with some overlay
from the Christian notions of heaven and hell.
The idea of a dialogue between the two sides of the
hemispheres is uppermost in Pacific Annwtciation (page
3O). From the Christian (Roman Catholic) imagery that
is inseparable from European art Albrecht found most
personal meaning in the iconography surrounding the
Virgin Mary and her pregnancy, particularly the
Annunciation. The response reflects the strength of
Albrecht's sense of her own womanhood. She is redressing
an imbalance, reaching back to pre-patriarchal days
before the subordination and final exclusion of the
female principle had taken place. In the Annunciation a
woman is protagonist and the focus is on an event of
supreme importance in the life of a woman - the
moment at which she learns that she is to have a child.
The powerful emotions aroused by this knowledge range
from despair to rapture. The Virgin was considered in
theology to pass through five successive mental and spir.
itual conditions when her future motherhood was
announced, from Conturbatio, or Disquiet, through
Reflection, Inquiry, Submission and finally to Merit as
she submits her will to that of God and the Angel
departs. So there is a dialogue or colloquy between the
Angel and Mary, and in many paintings on the theme
the Angel appears on the left and the Virgin on the
right. Though the Angel is known to have a male name,
Gabriel, 'he' is not differentiated sexually from the
Virgin in any visual way, and the colloquy appears to be
between two similar creatures - they are, in the paint.
ings Albrecht was looking at, on the same level, of the
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
40
same size. Renaissance artists could choose one of the
five conditions to depict: Donatello's Virgin in Santa
Croce turns sharply away, while the Fra Angelico
Annunciation in the Prado shows the Virgin submissive,
with head and eyes lowered and arms crossed over her
breast. Albrecht at one time considered a sequence of
five paintings based on the colloquy. Although she
chose not to systematise the subject to that extent, she
painted a number of works based on the theme. Some of
these refer to specific Renaissance works: Lunette for Fra
Angelico, Anntmciation (Fra Angelico), After Duccio, and
Annunci ati on ( D uc cio ) .
The title Pacfic Annunciation is a reminder of the
universality of an event that found such complete formulation
at another time and place. But it harks back to
those Renaissance formulations. The pink and deep blue
are colours associated with the Angel and the Virgin. As
in the Renaissance paintings, the two halves of
Albrecht's hemisphere are equal but separate, emphasising
the idea of debate between the heavenly and earthly
realm. The left-hand side is ethereal, aflutter, activated
with visible, light-reflecting marks, as if the winged
Angel has just come to rest after its flight; the right side
is dark, still and light.absorbing, suggesring the second
phase of the colloquy, the Virgin's meditation on rhe
Angel's message.
Few Renaissance images emphasise Mary's pregnant
shape as the Madonna del Parto does. Piero della
Francesca's picture is unusual in that it comes close to
representing the moment of birth. The Madonna's dress
splits into a vagina-like opening, and one knows that the
child is about to be bom.
Among their layers of meaning, Albrecht's hemi.
spheres include sexual reference. The curving shapes of
the quadrants meeting at a join can be read as an image
of female sexuality, just as Georgia O'Keeffe's flower and
shell imagery included those connotations. There is a
marvellous erotic element in a work like The Fire and the
Rose, of 1984, where the join between the two quadrants
becomes a cleft edged with curving folds. In some of the
works an explosive rhythm pulsates ourwards from the
centre, many are pervaded with a heady sensuousness
that is, in the widest sense of the term, erotic.
Reaching back to prehistoric rimes, the bodily refer.
ences of the hemisphere include the mound of the preg.
nant belly, or the breast, ancient symbols of fertility. Or
it can be read as picturing the modern view of the
human mind, the dome of the skull encasing the brain
with its own right and left'hemispheres'.
The range of thought and feeling explored in
Albrecht's hemispheres can be gauged by comparing the
later work Sea of Faith with those painted in 1984 and

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SEA OF FAITH
1989
Acrylic on canvas, 1200x2400 mm
Collection of Erika and Robin Congreve
NOCTURNE
1989
Acrylic on canvas, 1530x3060
Collection of the artisr

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Shrewsbury in 1403. Fleur Adcock chose to write the
story from the point of view of Horspur's wife, Elizabeth
Mortimer, and the ballad is not a celebration of the warrior
ethos. Part of the poem describes the unusual battle
fought by moonlight at Otterburn:
The Percies wore the silver crescent;
the moon was a full moon overhead.
Harry and his brother were taken,
but first they'd left the Dougias dead.
'Who was the victor on that field
the Scots and the English won't agree;
but which force won as songs will tell it
matters little that I can see:
it surges on from year to year,
one more battle and still one more:
one in defence, one in aggression,
another to balance out the score.
Crows flap
fretting for blood
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
The Horspur backdrop in the studio at Konini Road, 1980
44
The field of battle
is a ravening flood.
There is no safety
there is no shelter
the fel1 tide
will suck him under.
Albrecht saw the battle by moonlight as the imaginative
core of the poem, and her backdrop was dominated
by a huge black moon with a fine, crescent-shaped
rim of light at its edge. The image reinforced rhe link
Fleur Adcock had established between the fuil moon
and the crescent.shaped cap badge of the Percies, but
Albrecht has extended the image into a painting of an
eclipse, which simultaneously warns of rhe life about to
be blotted out and implies continuiry. It is worth noring
the re-emergence of a similar use of moon imagery in
Albrecht's paintings of 1990. The circle of the moon,
summoned into the forefront of the mind by Fleur
Adcock's ballad in 1980, was added to the other curving
shapes absorbed in Europe.

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surface that emphasises changeability, multiple
combinations. Collage supplies that. Collage draws
attention to itseif in a formal way, engages the viewer
by a series of little visual shocks. The cut edges are
abrupt transitions, unexpected, they create an illusion
of space. It's like making a whole out of discarded
shards. Perhaps there is a personal necessity at the
moment to be speaking about repair, putting shards
together. I create shards deliberately and the cut pieces
go onto a painted image to create a new whole. Some
of the marks are flowing gouache, others staccato, stuttering,
made by dragging my pastels over paper sitting
on corrugated cardboard. I'm rediscovering with great
pleasure the tactility of the line and mark, after some
years of painting in coloured shapes. There's an active
energy in lines and that's what I'm after.
Two collages of this time, 1988, are Ashen Terraces
and Pink Terraces (page 46). The titles refer to the
exquisite Pink and White Terraces, the natural formations
at Lake Rotomahana that drew visitors from all
over the world before they were destroyed in the
Tarawera eruption of 1886. The centennial of this catacl1.sm
was marked by an exhibition in Rotorua, and the
accompanying catalogue assembled many images of the
lost terraces. Albrecht said: 'l was interested in a paint-
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
The Pink Terrace, photographed in 1880 by William Co1lie
Tarawera Eruption Centennial Exhibition publication
48
ing of the lfhite Terrace by the early New Zealand artist
Charles Blomfield - those semicircular terraced pools,
with blue water spilling down.'
Both collages are elegiac' suggesting the fragile
beauty ofthe terraces. The deiicacy ofthe pale pinks and
whites is accentuated by bars and blocks ofsolid reds and
blues. Albrecht exploits the way water'based paints will
trickle and drip when applied to a vertical surface,
enacting the movement of water.
Similar imagery, terrace-like layers of colour, lies
within the encircling shapes that enclose Cataract and
Arcanum (page 47). In his 1990 essay on Albrecht's
collages Leonard Bell wrote:
The title, Arcatum, offers a key to an enticing reading
of these works. An arcanum is something hidden or
profound, or one of the supposed great secrets of creation
which alchemists aimed at discovering, or 2 o12r'
vellous remedy or elixir. Not that Albrecht has
mystical or alchemical pretensions. Rather this and
other titles point to prime concerns with the well'
springs of creativity, the shaping of form out of chaos,
with the phenomenon of transformation, and with correspondences
between form and colour and emotion
and idea . A concern with birth, rebirths, new
beginnings belongs to this.

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f
In 1989 a hysterectomy marked for Albrecht the
end of the possibility of child-bearing, bringing sharply
into focus for her a significant event in female experience.
The range of emotions surrounding the impossibility
of pregnancy are a mirror image of those that
surround the certainty of it. There are no precedents in
Christian iconography that a woman artist may draw on
to express these feelings. It is a new annunciation, an
important one for women at the end of the twentieth
century as both life expectancy and expectations from
life increase.
For many artists the work done in the second half of
life enlarges on what has gone before, and only with the
last painting are all the implications of the life work
realised. Approaching fony-eight, with thirty-five years
of dedicated painting behind her, Albrecht may well be
at the halfway point in her painting career. The paintings
from 1986 to 1990 take account of the losses and
gains of those years. Within the oval are reconciliation,
acquiescence and renewal.
There is a superb painting of an egg in Piero della
Francesca's Madonna with Child and Saints in the
Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. The egg hangs above the
Madonna's head, echoing the oval of her face, suspended
by a fine gold chain from the point of a scallop shell
where the radiating ribs converge. The shell is part of
the architectural setting, many times life size, acring as a
shallow canopy over the Madonna and Child. It ls
enclosed within the semicircle formed by the barrel.
vaulted recess behind the Madonna. It is curious ro nore
this conjunction of egg, shell and semicircle in a work by
a painter who has been a source to Albrecht since her
student days. In Piero's painting the egg has symbolic
force, signifying the birth of the new order associated
with the coming of Christ. It has an important pictorial
function as well, because it is easily read as hanging
directly above the Madonna's head, whereas its 'real'
place in the picture is a considerable distance behind
her. This ambiguous position helps to focus attention on
the egg and also pulls against the illusion of space Piero
has been at such pains to create by his immaculate
knowledge of one-point perspective. It asserts both the
painted illusion of space and the flatness of the actual
canvas.
poesic NOCTURNE (page 51) is a large oval painting
of 1990, a major commitment to the shape in which
Albrecht had already painted several smaller works during
1989. Its title places it close to the hemisphere of the
previous year. In both paintings the sheen of metallic
gold paint accentuates the inky depth of the dark tones.
Gold paint is rich in texture and in meaning gold has
always - suggested some kind of ultimate value. In the
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
52
Piero della Francesca's Madonna with Child and Saints
early Renaissance paintings that Albrecht finds rele.
vant, in Duccio and Fra Angelico, it symbolises the precious
realm of heaven, giving earth-bound mortals a
foretaste of that ultimate goal of faith and hope.
Ultimate value, Albrecht implies in poEsia NOC-
TURNE, resides in the unspeakable beauty of the
planet. The painting, with its division into equal zones
of blue and gold, is about night and day and the moment
when one gives way to the other.
The curve of dark blue within the gold zone is
ambiguous - it could be moving in or out. The curve
hints at cosmic interplays between light and dark, an
eclipse involving sun, moon and earth. But the painting
is also about moonlight, the pale light within the dark of
night.
There are formal contrasts in po1sia NOCTURNE
between the left- and right-hand sides. On the surface of
the gold field are organic horizontal red markings reminiscent
of the strokes of Monet's waterlilies; deep within
the dark blues ofthe left-hand side is an even darker vertical
geometric bar, like a division from Mondrian. The
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fourteen Stations of the Cross. In Albrecht's painting,
Veronica's veil becomes a hard-edged square of white
paint smudged with blue, at the centre of a painting in
which many tones and textures of deep blue combine to
suggest oceanic or cosmic depths. In Veil, the second
painting on the theme, layers of filmy pink and blue
paint evoke the transparency of veils, whether of mist or
rain or some diaphanous fabric. The marks that are made
in applying the paint imply something concealed behind
the veils, something that may be 'unveiled'. Here
Albrecht has used acrylic paint and its watery qualities
to suggest depth of a different kind from rhat evoked by
the rich density of oil paint in Veruica'sVeil.
Acrylic and oil combine in Stella (page 55). Not a
large painting in Albrecht's terms, this work touches on
events of an elemental magnitude. It is also a painting
that seems to look inwards, to move in towards a still,
small centre. 'Stella' is latin for 'star' and close enough
to the familiar'stellar'to reinforce the astronomical sug-
GRETCHEN ALBRECHT
56
gestions of the work without making claims that are too
vast. Albrecht explores the full shape of the oval, with
paint sweeping round the outer edges like the action of
some nebular whirlpool at the beginning of time. Gold
paint streams amongst dark brown-black, suggesting the
moment when light emerged from the primal dark -
the metaphor from the biblical account of creation. To
one side a small rectangle of purple oil paint quietly
brings the viewer down to earth, deliberately limiting
the scope of the painting. The left curve of the oval is
tumed into a slim arc of deep red, and this, too, interrupts
the heady spiralling rhythms of the work, remind.
ing us that it is, after all, a painting. At the centre of the
work are one or two strokes of blue paint that sing out in
the dark like the flash of a kingfisher's wing. It may very
well be that the transformation of those sffokes of blue
into a minor miracle of luminosity is what the painting is
most deePlY about'
Lindnciu
.3il-

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1985 Commissioned by the Dowse Arr Museum, Lower
Hutt, to make a poster for the exhibitionWomeninNew
ZeabndSocietl 1884-1985. Thts work was dedicated to Helen
F. V. Scales, who died on 11 January 1985. tavels to New York
for the NZ/NY exhibition as one of the participating arrists.
Spends February visiting Romanesque churches in Europe.
1986 Tiavels to Chicago as one of the parriciparing arrisrs in
a group exhibition New Zealand Art Today, organised by the
New Zealand Consulate in New York. Awarded Queen
Elizabeth II Arts Council Grant.
1987 Tiavels to Europe assisted by grant, visits Documenta I
at Kassel. Meets Jenny Todd in London. Establishes a studio in
old joinery factory in Grey Lynn.
CHRONOLOGY
Gretchen Albrecht in her Grey Lynn studio, 1990
Photo, Garry Sturgess
5B
,l988 September, exhibition at Todd Gallery London. On
retum to New Zealand moves home to studio building. Spends
most of the year working on large collages on paper.
1989 Continues collages and begins first oval
paintings. Briefhospitalisation in August. Invited guesr arrist
for seminar, Painting Department, School of Fine Arts,
Auckland. Invited outside examiner for Painting Department,
School of Fine Arts. Visits Paris during December/January
1990.
1990 Spends February in London, doing paintings on paper
before retuming to New Zealand. Brief hospitalisation in
March. November, travels to London for second exhibition at
Todd Gallery.