Karen Gunderson: Dark Waves Rising — Karen Gunderson

Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce Dark Waves Rising, an exhibition of new paintings by Karen Gunderson, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York in over ten years and first with the gallery since joining in 2025. Gunderson will debut paintings from two bodies of work, Moon and Water, that have been unfolding and evolving over several decades. Dark Waves Rising sees Gunderson continuing her pursuit of the haptic with paintings that shift and adapt to their environment through an intensely rich surface texture that brings each scene beyond a purely visual register of experience. On November 7th Yancey Richardson will host Gunderson in conversation with Margaret Andera, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition will be on view from October 22 through December 19, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 22 from 6–8PM.

Over the past forty years Gunderson has pioneered an approach to painting featuring black pigments and a labor-intensive technique built around rigorous brushwork and paint layering to create a unique, three-dimensional effect. The multiple textures of the paint appear to shimmer and move, alternating with shadows and highlights that illuminate her subjects depending on how the viewer moves in front of each canvas. Just as they respond to the atmospheric and lighting conditions of where they are exhibited, Gunderson’s paintings possess a cinematic quality as well, unfolding over time rather than being apprehended in an instant. Her dynamic compositions are informed by her use of photography as a source of inspiration and possibility. With reference to either an original or found photograph, she carefully develops her compositions by working from every angle to best capture the effects of light reflecting off of the canvas.

Gunderson’s new Water paintings originate in her own photographs made while whale watching on Cape Cod or overlooking the banks of the Hudson river directly behind her studio. Sifting through hundreds of images before selecting one as the structure for a painting, Gunderson then projects the image onto canvas as a reference before transforming it into a vision of luminous color and depth of tone anchored by a complex architecture of form. The long, fluid movement of the brush gives each cresting or undulating wave a textured surface that not only describes the quality of light, but which also captures it in real time, leading to an optical effect whereby the scene seems to open and close, get lighter or darker, as it moves around it. Though the Water paintings have typically been rendered in black, Dark Waves Rising features the first canvases that include the use of blue pigments, which create a radiant, almost jewel-like quality to the ocean.

The new Moon paintings continue a series that Gunderson first began as a response to reports in 1999-2000 that major corporations were exploring the possibility of advertising in space. Gunderson imagined her paintings would advocate for preserving the cosmos, in particular the moon, and keeping it unsullied by human avarice. Using NASA images as a reference, she begins a multi-step process to establish the outline shape of the moon, render shadows and fine details on its surface, before finally pulling a large brush across the entire surface of the painting to impart a unifying effect. As in the Water paintings, Gunderson’s brushwork similarly follows the spherical appearance of the moon itself to heighten its roundness and sharpen the contrast with the rest of the image.

Seen together, the Moon and Water paintings create a natural dialogue around what sustains life both around us and above, while also asking us to consider just how durable those sources remain. Gunderson’s capacity to render the dramatic effects of light over time and through form allow paintings from each series to interact with one another, as though the moon were the light source for the ocean waves that sweep and fall, a reminder of the ultimate connection between the world we can reach and the one we might still strive for.