After more than three decades of working Klunder’s current paintings are among the most assured of his career despite his own feeling that the act of painting is “a very humbling thing.” Using a refined vocabulary of forms that are uniquely his, Klunder builds many-layered works that suggest ideas of living time; primordial biology and the procreative impulse; the shifting nature of personality and the history of painting itself. Klunder shares Dutch roots with both Mondrian and de Kooning and his own work seems well-situated between the ordered calm of the former and the unmoored flights of the latter.
Klunder has said that the show’s title “is connected to how a painting evolves, from an Ideal, a search for what I think I am after, to what it inevitably becomes, Actual. From a thought to an object.” Klunder works on single paintings for long periods, sometimes years at a time, and in doing so they become invested with a deep, mutable, interior sense of self. His paintings are vivid evidence of his effort to give shape to consciousness itself.
