The next Artist You Need To Know is Harold Klunder.
Klunder is a Canadian painter who is best known for his paintings which explore, challenge and redefine the idea of self portraiture. His works are immediately recognizable by their abundant use of paint, intense application of multiple layers and how they sometimes take years to create.
“…Klunder himself defies rigid comparisons. He paints according to feeling: creating charged surfaces intuitively and freely – removing himself from the formal aspects of painting. Through Klunder’s process, texture amasses in abundance. The sculptural forms created by his thick impastos carry as much life as the subject matter of the works themselves. Heavy paint pulsates with a buoyancy of colour. These are not works resulting from a quick slather; these are works that accumulate momentously, like geological formations. Klunder’s paintings give a taste of the surreal despite being rooted firmly in real life. They are bohemian, musical and abstract, chunky.” (from here)
Klunder was born in Deventer, The Netherlands, in 1943 and almost a decade later his family would emigrate to Canada (specifically Toronto, where he lived and grew up). He would attend the Central Technical School in that same city. An educator as well as a significant artist, Klunder began teaching at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1994 : later he would also teach at the University of Lethbridge (in Alberta) from 1997 – 1998.
“It is a struggle for everybody, especially when you are young, so much has to happen. Doing the work is the most important part.”
From TrépanierBaer : “Klunder is well known for his large-scale textural paintings that echo the Dutch tradition of impasto painting in the style of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, de Kooning, and Mondrian. A talented and unabashed colourist, Klunder’s rich hues become the substance of his paintings, piling up and shifting from representation into abstract expressionism. Each painting presents a visual play of paint that can take the artist several years to complete. Despite his slow and deliberate hand, Klunder’s paintings sustain both a sense of energy and urgency.”
Klunder’s massive, abstracted artworks are impressive labours, employing thick layers of paint and almost sculptural in their definition. One critic commented that his paintings sometimes seemed so thick they might pull down the gallery walls with the sheer weight of paint, and this paired well with how Klunder mined the idea of self portraiture in a manner that was also challenging and sometimes overwhelming to the viewer. Many of his works might be said to be ‘heavy’ in terms of their physical mass, but also in terms of painting an interior world of the artist under the umbrella of self portraiture.
He has worked in various manners and in different media over his career : in the 1970s, Klunder’s paintings were rife with geometric shapes and patterns. In the 1980s Klunder began to work in oil paint (a more lustrous and physical painting media than acrylic in many ways) and a more figural, drawn motif began to appear in his artworks. As this style progressed, Klunder often described such pieces as being ‘psychic realism’. By the late 1990s, his compositions – especially as he worked more in watercolour – were less dense and dark, having an openness that was new for him but still centred around figures and figural references.
Writing about an exhibition of Klunder’s artwork for Border Crossings Magazine in 2008, painter Virginia Dixon offered the following response : “I speak of forms and space as paint because Klunder’s world is paint. It is alluvial; it flows and slows, deposits here what it swept up there.”
Klunder has exhibited widely, specifically in Canada but also in Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan, and China. Notable shows include a 1996 exhibition at the Tom Thomson Memorial Gallery (Owen Sound, ON) and Museum London (1999). His artworks are in numerous permanent collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa, ON), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, MacKenzie Art Gallery, MacLaren Art Centre, The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Robert Mclaughlin Art Gallery, Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, AB) and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. A more detailed list of his exhibitions and accomplishments can be found here.
A conversation between Klunder and fellow painter Ron Shuebrook can be enjoyed here.
Critic Robert Enright once prefaced a published interview with Klunder with the following succinct summation of the artist’s aesthetic : Klunder “makes a painting the way life is lived: everything goes in and everything must be considered.”
Klunder is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) and currently lives in Montréal. More information about Klunder’s life and work can be enjoyed here (along with many more images of his impressive artworks) here at the Clint Roenisch Gallery site.