TENT
Gretchen Albrecht, Elizabeth Thomson

Otherworldly

In a second TENT project Two Rooms presents work by Gretchen Albrecht and Elizabeth Thomson in collaboration with Independent Art Consultant Kate Darrow at her home. Designed by award winning Herbst Architects in 2006, the building sits unobtrusively in a natural forest setting, near Cambridge. 

Gretchen  Albrecht will be offering a singular painting from her remarkable quartet of hemispheres titled After Goya. Uninterrupted time in her studio during the first 2020 lockdown enabled Gretchen to pursue the otherwise challenging objective of undertaking four major paintings referencing portraits of eminent woman by Spanish Romantic painter Francisco Goya, in particular that of Maria Josefa Pimentel, 12^th Countess-Duchess of Benavente. Rather than a straight representation of the subject, Albrecht has produced an abstract and dramatic response to the 18^th century painter’s work , with its assured brushstrokes resonating over canvas with a sensuous colour palette of blue and purple, pink and white. Combining formal, historical and ephemeral qualities, this work is not only a homage to Goya’s famous portrait but to its subject who was renowned for the patronage of artists, writers and scientists.

Elizabeth Thomson is presenting a new ‘exoplanet’ artwork for TENT. An exoplanet is a planet which orbits a star other than our own sun. They cannot be seen directly with telescopes as they are hidden by the glare of the stars they orbit. Much of the scientific interest in exoplanets stems from whether they might be habitable and what they might tell us about our own world. Elizabeth’s ‘exoplanet’ works draw upon her long standing fascination with aerial perspectives and satellite imaging. At once worldly and otherworldly’, the exoplanet is an embrace of the physical realm, in all its strangeness and beauty bringing us closer to the complex planet on which we live.

The Bark House
14a Cranmere Drive
Tamahere, Waikato

Kate Darrow: 021706751