Untitled #1050, 25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018

“Abstraction or non-figuration is very liberating in that you’re able to speak about anything without the problem of depicting figurative images that kind of pin you down. “I can roam freely in all directions and gather the layers that I need into the painting so that the content is revealed in all these many different layers that come into it through colour and movement and shape and rhythm and all the tools of the painter.”

—Gretchen Albrecht, 2006

On her colour-field series: “They are very considered paintings, but my handling of paint allows for a seemingly spontaneous feel to them. Of course, it is, in a way, totally spontaneous because I rarely go to the newly stretched up canvas with a pre-determined idea in my head. […] The gestural physicality of my process means I can let everything grow organically as the painting dictates where it wants to go.”

—Gretchen Albrecht, 2015

1969 Comeback Special 27 August – 6 November 2016

Gretchen Albrecht is one of New Zealand’s leading abstract painters. Her series of colourfield paintings from the early 1970s, including this work, continue to resonate four decades after they were painted. There’s an inherent purity in these paintings, with overlaying horizontal bands of pure colours applied to unprimed canvases. They respond to the natural environment of the Waitakere Ranges near Auckland, where the artist has been based throughout her career. Muir acquired this work directly from Albrecht in 1974.