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Artist: Karen Gunderson

Yancey Richardson presents Dark Waves Rising, an exhibition of new paintings by Karen Gunderson, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York in over ten years and her first with the gallery. The exhibition presents paintings from two bodies of work, Moon and Water, subjects with which she has worked since 2005. In Dark Waves Rising, she continues her exploration of the haptic, creating paintings that shift and respond to their surroundings through richly worked surfaces and a deeply hued palette.

Since 1989, Gunderson has developed a singular approach to painting, using exclusively black pigments, meticulous brushwork, and successive layers of paint to create an extraordinary illusion of three-dimensional depth. Dark Waves Rising is the first exhibition featuring several paintings made with a deep blue paint. Though physically flat, her paintings appear to possess volume and movement. They unfold cinematically over time, resisting an immediate, singular reading. As viewers move before the canvas, shifting shadows and highlights animate the surfaces, revealing subtle changes in light, texture, and form.

Gunderson draws inspiration from both her own photographs and found photographs. Her dark, horizonless seascapes evoke the ocean’s mysterious and ever-changing character, their illusionistic surfaces suggesting depths that remain just beyond reach. These works are informed in part by photographs she has taken on whale-watching trips off Cape Cod. For her full-moon paintings, she turns to found photographs made by NASA surveying the moon’s surface. Working from these source images, she carefully develops each composition, studying it from multiple angles to understand and capture the effects of light as it reflects across the painted surface. Gunderson’s steadfast emphasis on representational imagery in her paintings is an extension of her belief in the redemptive power of humanity’s encounter with and contemplation of the natural world.

Karen Gunderson (b. 1943, Racine, Wisconsin) spent much of her career in New York City, exhibiting with Fischbach Gallery and associating with the artists Sol LeWitt, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning. She now lives and works in Coxsackie, New York, where her studio overlooks the Hudson River. A recipient of the 2020 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, her 2004 solo exhibition Los Cuadros Negros at Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, was the first by an American woman in 125 years. Gunderson’s work has been exhibited throughout the U.S and abroad, including at the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Carter, Fort Worth; Artists Space, New York; and the National Museum of Bahrain among others.

Karen Gunderson, Blue Waves, 2025. Oil on linen, 50 x 50 inches.