Subheadline: Through richly layered oil paintings of ocean waves and the moon, the artist transforms darkness into a shifting visual experience, inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between light, texture, and the natural world.
When a Painting Seems to Move
A dark ocean can conceal as much as it reveals. Waves rise out of shadow, light gathers briefly along their crests, and the horizon disappears into an expanse that seems to extend beyond the limits of vision. In Karen Gunderson’s paintings, these fleeting effects become the foundation for a sustained exploration of perception.
At Yancey Richardson Gallery in Chelsea, Dark Waves Rising brings together new paintings from two interconnected bodies of work, Water and Moon. Opening October 22, 2026, and running through December 5, the exhibition marks Gunderson’s first solo presentation in New York in more than a decade and her first exhibition with the gallery since joining its roster in 2025. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search1″,”turn549709search2”]}/>
The paintings ask viewers to look closely—and then to keep looking. Their surfaces change as the viewer moves, revealing differences in shadow, reflection, and texture. Although the canvases remain physically still, the imagery appears to shift over time, producing an experience that unfolds gradually rather than all at once.
Four Decades of Working with Darkness
Gunderson, born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1943, has developed a distinctive approach to representational painting over a career spanning approximately six decades. Her practice has been particularly associated with black pigments, meticulous brushwork, and successive layers of oil paint that create the illusion of volume and depth.
Her approach depends on more than the depiction of a dark subject. Gunderson builds her compositions through carefully controlled variations in the painted surface. Highlights and shadows emerge from the accumulation of marks, while the direction and density of the brushwork help suggest the structure of water or the rounded form of a celestial body.
This method gives her work a tactile dimension. A wave is not simply an image of water; its painted surface becomes an essential part of how the viewer perceives the wave. The interplay between pigment, texture, and reflected light encourages a heightened awareness of the material object hanging on the wall.
The gallery describes this pursuit as haptic: an emphasis on the relationship between seeing and the sensation of touch. Viewers cannot physically feel the painted surfaces, but their eyes register the apparent ridges, contours, and undulations. The paintings make visual perception feel almost physical. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search2″,”turn549709search3”]}/>
The Ocean as an Unstable Landscape
The Water paintings begin with Gunderson’s photographs, including images she has taken while whale watching off Cape Cod and views of the Hudson River near her studio in Coxsackie, New York. After reviewing hundreds of photographs, she selects an image that provides a compositional starting point. She then uses it as a reference while developing the painting through a highly deliberate process of observation and brushwork. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search2”]}/>
The resulting seascapes are recognizable but not straightforward illustrations. Waves occupy the picture plane without necessarily offering a stable horizon or an obvious sense of scale. The viewer may find it difficult to determine whether the water is close enough to touch or stretches across an immense distance.
That ambiguity is central to the paintings’ appeal. Gunderson uses familiar elements of the natural world to produce an experience that feels unfamiliar. The sea becomes a shifting field of tonal relationships, its surface alternately appearing to recede, swell, or catch the light.
In Dark Waves Rising, the introduction of blue pigments marks an important development. Gunderson has generally rendered her water imagery using black, making the new blue paintings a departure within the series. The blue creates a more luminous, jewel-like effect while preserving the layered textures and carefully constructed forms that define her practice. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search2″,”turn549709search3”]}/>
The change does not simply make the ocean brighter. It expands the range of ways darkness can be experienced, demonstrating how a shift in color can transform the emotional character of an otherwise familiar subject.
Looking Upward: The Moon Paintings
The exhibition’s second major body of work, Moon, extends Gunderson’s investigation of light and form from the ocean to the night sky.
The series has roots in concerns she began exploring around 1999 and 2000, when reports emerged that major corporations were considering advertising in space. Gunderson imagined her paintings as an argument for preserving the moon and the wider cosmos from commercial exploitation. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search2”]}/>
For these works, she draws on NASA imagery to study the moon’s surface, establishing its outline and gradually building its shadows and fine details. A final stage of broad brushwork unifies the surface and reinforces the moon’s spherical appearance.
The process parallels her work with water. In both series, the direction of the brush follows the underlying form, helping to create the impression of physical volume. The moon’s craters and shadows become an intricate landscape, while the surrounding darkness emphasizes its apparent depth.
Works such as Bear Moon and Sturgeon Moon, both dated 2026, bring this approach into the exhibition’s present. The paintings invite contemplation of a celestial body that is at once familiar and remote—a constant presence in human culture, yet physically distant and increasingly visible through scientific imagery. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search1″,”turn549709search2”]}/>
Two Bodies of Work, One Natural Conversation
Seen together, Water and Moon form more than a collection of separate subjects. They create a dialogue between the forces that shape the world below and the celestial body that illuminates it.
The moon can be understood as a source of reflected light, while the ocean becomes the surface on which that light might appear to shimmer. Gunderson’s attention to the movement of light across painted forms encourages viewers to imagine connections between the two series, even when each painting presents a self-contained scene.
This relationship also introduces a larger environmental concern. The moon and the ocean are essential parts of a natural world that humans observe, use, and seek to understand. Gunderson’s paintings encourage attention to these environments without turning them into literal illustrations of a specific environmental argument. Their power comes from the patience they demand and the visual richness they reveal.
In an age of fast-moving digital images, her work offers a different pace of looking. The paintings reward sustained attention, and their apparent movement emerges through the viewer’s own position in front of the canvas. The experience is therefore not entirely contained in the artwork: it develops through the encounter between the painting, the surrounding light, and the person looking at it.
A Chelsea Exhibition Built Around Close Looking
For New York audiences, Dark Waves Rising offers an opportunity to encounter an artist whose practice has remained committed to the possibilities of painting itself. Gunderson has spent much of her career working in and around New York, and she now lives and works in Coxsackie, where her studio overlooks the Hudson River. She received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2020, and her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search2″,”turn549709search3”]}/>
The gallery will host an opening reception on October 22 from 6 to 8 p.m. A conversation between Gunderson and Margaret Andera, senior curator of contemporary art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, is scheduled for November 7. <Cite refs={[“turn549709search2″,”turn549709search3”]}/>
At its core, Dark Waves Rising is an exhibition about what happens when looking becomes an extended experience. Through dark pigment, layered paint, and carefully studied natural forms, Gunderson makes water and moonlight seem to emerge from the surface of the canvas. Her paintings do not merely represent movement; they use the conditions of viewing to suggest it.
The result is an invitation to slow down and reconsider the familiar. In Gunderson’s hands, darkness is not an absence of information. It is a space in which light, texture, and form become newly visible.
Exhibition details
- Exhibition: Dark Waves Rising
- Artist: Karen Gunderson
- Venue: Yancey Richardson Gallery, 525 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, New York
- Dates: October 22–December 5, 2026
- Opening reception: October 22, 6–8 p.m.
- Artist conversation: November 7, with Margaret Andera
- Official exhibition page: https://yanceyrichardson.com/exhibitions/karen-gunderson
