Albrecht moves into the third dimension

By ANDREW CLIFFORD


"Not bad for a 61-year-old," laughs Gretchen Albrecht, enthusing about the dramatic new development in her work.

Albrecht's painting career, spanning more than 40 years, has seen many distinct phases; from her early mythological scenes to the still-life and landscape imagery that led her into colourful sweeps of abstract colour in the 1970s; from flowing banners to her trademark canvas hemispheres and ellipses.

Now she is venturing into the three-dimensional realms of sculpture.

Oceans, Clouds & Thresholds is the official debut of Gretchen Albrecht the sculptor but she has been preparing for this for some time.

"I've been making macquettes in my studio out of corrugated cardboard boxes over the last two or three years," she says. "In particular, at Christmas we go to our bach on the west coast and, to amuse myself, I cut some ellipses out of some old empty boxes and then I used a plasterer's tape, which is like a white mesh - it's quite sticky - to do my ribbons.

"This year I thought I'd love to see them made up into metal and we found this wonderful engineer who made these three from my little macquettes and stepped the ideas of the paintings into three dimensions. It has been absolutely, extraordinarily exciting for me to work in that way."

With her shaped canvases and layers of opaque and transparent colour, Albrecht's paintings play with the complex figure-field relationships between foreground and background.

By moving off the canvas and into sculpture, her negative spaces and translucent surfaces now absorb and reflect their surroundings in the three-dimensional world. Also, strips of wire mesh, which resemble gestural brush-strokes, can move beyond and around what was once the painting's border.

"The looping of the mesh was an absolute delight because it was like a dancer and it was choreographed. I wanted them to be both solid and strong and intense and feminine and I had in my mind the kind of ribbons and tutus and that kind of allusion, but they're also related to the gesture of paint."

Although Albrecht has been working entirely in abstraction for more than 30 years, her work continues to evoke concepts, qualities and forms from nature. Clouds have been a subject in recent works, which she researched not only in the paintings of Turner and Constable but also photographs and weather reports.

"The reference back to an idea of nature is, for me, very much a part of what I gather in for sustenance in the work. It's the idea, which is partly why, as an abstract painter, it is a springboard. It creates a layer of meaning into the work that is very hard in New Zealand not to be affected [by]."

Now that Albrecht is working with objects, the forms she has developed in her painting can have an even closer conversation with nature.

"They [the sculptures] speak very closely to the paintings and I do know that my desire to see them on a larger scale would be because they'd have, not just weight and density, but engage the sky and the landscape and the water and they'd be outdoors and that would be wonderful.

"Ideally, I see them floating above a pool of water or sitting in some shimmering, watery surface and, ideally, I see them growing to 8 or ten feet. My dream is to see these reflected in water. I have a fish pond at home and at the end of the show I'll take them home and put them in it and have the pleasure of seeing its reflection."

Although Albrecht is a renowned colourist, her first public foray into sculpture is mostly monochromatic.

"I love the silver and the stainless steel mesh; it all seemed to be right for this particular debut. He [the metal etcher] could have screened colour on to that but there was something about the purity of using the sun and water, in my mind's eye, to allow the shape to speak."

This isn't to say we can't look forward to seeing Albrecht's sumptuous colour schemes in future sculptural developments.

"Well, you learn as you go. But, of course, I have more to do. I will continue to make sculpture. I am a wee bit like a baby getting up and walking. Next time I will see how the next sculptures will be and some will be coloured."

Exhibition

*What: Oceans, Clouds & Thresholds, by Gretchen Albrecht

*Where and when: Sue Crockford Gallery, 2 Queen St, to Nov 20