Graduating from the University of Auckland’s Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts in 2012, Amanda Gruenwald has developed a striking and ambitious painting practice that speaks to the heart of the medium. Awarded the Gordon Harris Painting Prize and the Kate Edgar Charitable Trust Grant in her final year of study, Gruenwald has distinguished herself as a thoughtful and formidable artist, receiving her first public gallery exposure in 2017 at the Govett-Brewster / Len Lye Centre in Surface Affect, with Jeena Shin and Michael Zavros.

Gruenwald is alert to our image-saturated digital and physical landscape, referencing the use of designers’ colour profiles and topographers’ physical profiles. Working at scale with colour and form, Gruenwald’s distinctive shapes collide, bleed and fray into one another. Cognisant of the great American colour field painters, Gruenwald subtly subverts their dictates and skirts around their rules, disrupting the flatness of the painting’s plane with layers of over-painting and paint erasure, that together mediate a balance between deliberation and intuition. In an interplay between construction and deconstruction there is an oscillation between thickness and thinness, energy and calm, that ebb and flow over Gruenwald’s surfaces according to their interior logic.

For a decade Gruenwald’s practice of painting on stretched canvases was resonant of the self-titled Radical Painters of the 80’s, for whom the support structure is an object whose specific purpose is to-be-painted. Recent paintings represent a bold new direction navigating the liminal space between intention and concurrent attempts to harness the role of chance.

Working on unstretched canvas on the studio floor allows “a really different experience. I’m able to walk on the canvas and be ‘in’ the painting as I make it. There’s a real connection between the body, the materials and the resulting mark making. I can compose from within the picture.” These floor paintings draw on diverse histories – Neo-Impressionism, action and colour field painting, gestural and geometric abstraction – in conversation with an array of contemporary international and local practices.

Amanda Gruenwald lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.