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karen gunderson

Karen Gunderson (b. 1943) was born in Racine, Wisconsin. She earned a BS in art education from the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, an MA in painting and MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa in Iowa City. Graduating in 1968, Gunderson became the first student to receive an MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa. Gunderson is known for her large-scale cloud paintings and move, starting in 1988, to an all-black, monochromatic color palette. Her work depicts the natural environment and historical figures.

American art critic Donald Kuspit wrote in the catalogue for her 1998 solo exhibition at Donahue/Sosinki Art in New York:

Gunderson’s achievement—her brilliance—is to reconcile the old master use of chiaroscuro to shape figures with [Ad] Reinhardt’s conception of black as the ultimate medium of art. Her work has the richness and complexity of old master painting and the purist ambition of modernist painting […] Gunderson shows that black can be an ideal medium of representation […] to represent objects that exist in the negative space of memory.

Gunderson has shown her work internationally including solo and group exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Fischbach Gallery, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; Donahue/Sosinski Art, New York, NY; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI ;The Holocaust Museum, Houston, TX; Clamp Art, New York, NY; Biennale Internazionale Dell’Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy; The Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; National Museum of Gdansk, Poland; The National Museum of Bahrain, Manama, Bahrain and Waterhouse & Dodd, New York, NY. Gunderson’s work has been featured in top art fairs globally including Art Basel, Art Miami, the Armory Show, and the Dallas Art Fair alongside the private collections of The Four Seasons Hotel, 21 C Art Hotel, and other prominent collectors. The artist’s paintings have been utilized in projects by notable interior designers including Nate Berkus.

Gunderson has received many honors and awards, most notably a Lorenzo Magnifico Prize in Painting at the 2001 Florence Biennale. In 2020, Gunderson was honored with the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman prize. She was named by noted critic Donald Kuspit as one of the “New Old Masters.”

Since the late-1960s, Gunderson’s work has appeared in major publications such as The New York Times, Arts Magazine, ARTnews, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Village Voice. She was the subject of a recent monograph, Karen Gunderson: The Dark World of Light, written by Pulitzer-prize winning biographer, Elizabeth Frank, published by Abbeville Press in 2016. Gunderson currently lives and works in Coxsackie, NY