HENRY GUNDERSON

In The House Painter, a man atop a paint spattered ladder reaches hisbrush to the top of the canvas. He’s Henry and he’s not Henry. The laborthat goes into preparing a surface for painting–stretching the canvastaught and priming white with gesso–is dramatised in the subjectpainting a house facade. Gunderson completed ten house paintings,but The House Painter breaks from the conventions of the series. Thefigure rendered Trompe-l’oeil allows for a meta moment in the exhibitionwhere we zoom out beyond the facade and see the house painter,painting in the shape of a house, we see the raw canvas exposed. Daylabourer becomes fine artist, the two are interchangeable.

Blueskin VP100 depicts a house or shed under construction coveredin Henry brand vapour barrier, a window in place of a nose gives aglimpse into the raw interior, while the blue eyes stare out at the viewer.In construction, builders use Henry brand products to make surfacesair tight, water tight, and weather tight to give protection against the elements. Blue on the surface, freckled with white screen printedlogos, the giant house-shaped head feels like flayed skin, protecting asubcutaneous layer of commonality.

When Gunderson moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn a few years ago, hishome was in such disrepair that the landlord offered him six monthsof free rent to fix it up. I remember him methodically remodelling thesmall house on a city block so that he could live like a ship’s captain inhis domestic quarters with a single large studio room. He set himselfto removing ceilings and laying floors, all while other houses on theblock were being gentrified by huge crews building speculative luxuryhousing in hopes of flipping property that had once been flop housesfor longshoremen. Inside this home studio, Henry Gunderson eventuallymade his House paintings, without any assistance.

After the move, his new surroundings found themselves in the paintings.The large cardinal with a healthy worm in its beak leans in at you withan exaggerated inquisitive leer, distorted as if through the lens of apeephole in a door in Painted Bird House. To paint the wildly colourfulbrush strokes, Gunderson built a large brush so he could work in thescale of the cardinal. While we know the big red bird lives in that house,when encountering other works, for example Blue Earth Dwelling, achild might ask, “Who lives here?” A pair of long boots with wet greenand blue socks dry after a long stomp in the mud. ‘Could the occupantbe Mother Earth herself?’ one might ask themselves while noticing theprism refracting atmospheric rainbow around the facade. Or does theinterior suggests a haunted house, do spirits live here?

For this exhibition, Gunderson paints seven house-shaped canvases,distilling the feelings of isolation into unpopulated facades. Nobody wantsto talk about the pandemic, but something happened to our living spaces:we became momentarily atomised. If you are wondering if the house shapefeels inherently psychological, it is. Preschool children have been asked totake the “House-Person-Tree test,” to evaluate their mental health for the last hundred years. Here, rather than a place where a family lives, Gunderson’s paintings feel single occupancy. They represent American loneness, from

Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond to the cabin where Jack London wrote White Fang or even Ted Kaczynski’s shack. These house paintings are ‘Unapaintings’ as much as they are a group of paintings.

Press release courtesy Perrotin. Text: Joey Frank.