Karen Gunderson and the Subtle Complexity of Black

Karen Gunderson loves water. Whether boating north up the Hudson River or riding a ferry across Lake Michigan, she’ll always leave her warm, comfortable seat and make her way to the bow to see the waves part before her. “In sunlight, water can take on color and appear blue or green,” Gunderson tells Observer. “But, when you look down in the shadows below the boat, the water is black.”

Gunderson is very much at home in the black, manipulating it in shades and values unlike any other artist working today. In the 21st Century, it’s easy to suggest artists have already mastered all possible forms of traditional, analog painting. Whether the medium is oil, acrylic, tempera, ink, etc., the cooperation of paint, brush and palette knife is thoroughly explored and perhaps all but exhausted. All creators can do to explore new frontiers in 2026 is pick up a tablet with Procreate installed. But 82-year-old Gunderson does not accept that premise. Through her ongoing explorations, she has invented a groundbreaking method of manipulating paint, light and shadow to create the illusion of motion in two-dimensional works.

Born in Racine, WI, she decided to pursue art as a career while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. “I was originally going to study childhood education and took an art class as part of that curriculum,” she explains. “My professors saw the drawings and cornered me. They insisted I major in art.” There happened to be a rare concentration of talent in the small, rural art program, according to Gunderson. Eleven of her classmates moved on to graduate art programs; she matriculated into the advanced art program at the University of Iowa to study under Hans Breder, the groundbreaking artist who worked across multiple media.

Breder’s freedom of experimentation allowed Gunderson to work in everything from oil paint to acrylic sheets arranged in three-dimensional spaces. Many of those early works focused on clouds. “It was a natural choice because it was Iowa,” she says. “All we saw was clouds for most of the year.” That early work with the sky’s flowing, natural forms would eventually evolve into the moving black paintings that define Gunderson’s 21st-century work. (Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Frank compiled a monograph of her work called The Dark World of Light, released in 2016.) In them, she studies the shifting patterns of water while revealing the unexpected complexity within black itself. “There are many colors in black,” she explains. “Peach Black is the darkest paint I use. But, there’s ivory black, lamp black. Every black has its own identity and subtle colors that emerge in the light.”

Consequently, hanging one of Gunderson’s paintings properly requires installing a precisely targeted lighting setup. When the light strikes carefully applied vertical and horizontal brushstrokes, the patterns “move” as a viewer walks toward, away from or around the painting.

“I work from photographs that I’ve taken,” she says. “I find an image that feels right to me. It’s just a feeling about what I want to show. And I want to create the idea of movement in the piece. I draw what the wave edges are, but I don’t stick to that because it would be too busy and too lost. I choose larger shapes to create the feeling of the forms and what I want the painting to be.”

When not moving around the work to experience its kinetic illusions, first-time viewers of Gunderson’s black paintings often assume thick, shaped paint has been applied to the canvas in the layered impasto tradition of Van Gogh or Pollock. A closer inspection reveals that her work consists of thin, two-dimensional layers.

“I want to have the energy of the paint in the work,” she adds. “Instead of having normal brush marks and allowing recognizable items to become the image-when you don’t really see the energy as much-I really want to be able to see the movement and life of the water. That interest may have developed growing up in Wisconsin, so near to the Great Lakes.”

Heading deeper into 2026, the Milwaukee Art Museum is redesigning much of its gallery space, rotating some pieces off the walls and introducing new acquisitions. Gunderson and Erin Cluley Gallery recently made a gift of Waves Are Coming Home, from 2025, to the museum’s collection. “The museum and my family have a mutual friend who’s an incredible curator, Maggie Adler,” she explains. “Maggie has been a huge supporter, and she works with Kristen Gaylord [curator of photography and media arts at MAM]. They tell me they sort of fell in love with my work.”

Gunderson, who is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City and the Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas, enjoys knowing her painting will hang in her home state’s most prominent galleries alongside fellow Wisconsin legends championed by the museum, such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright. When Waves Are Coming Home moves from its current home among new acquisitions to its eventual long-term spot in the Santiago Calatrava-designed complex, Gunderson hopes to return to supervise the setup of the lighting to ensure the work is illuminated to full effect. “I don’t get to come home very often from my gallery in New York,” she says. “If I do have the opportunity to get back, I look forward to bringing my husband, my son and his family to share in that work finding its home.”

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