Karen Gunderson adopted a black palette in the 1980s, following a series of cloud paintings that layered pinks and blues on top of a black ground, which gave the clouds a more concrete appearance. She discovered her manipulation of purely black paint could capture light and movement in an unexpected and distinct way, what critic Gerard McCarthy described in Art in America as “a deft working in surface texture alone.”

Often depicting water, mountain ranges, and celestial bodies, her works take traditional painting subject matter—landscapes, for example, or royal portraiture—and transform them into modern and unusual imagery. A stunning example of these is The Following Seas (2016), a small yet stunning, and deceptively simple monochromatic painting of choppy waves. Because of the trompe l’oeil impression of depth when viewing the compositions in print, it is difficult to envision the paintings as they are in person—entirely flat with no impasto or relief. Over the past eighteen years she has perfected a technique whereby pictorial illusions result from white light reflected off the raised edges of varied brushstrokes.

"My black paintings use a process which calls upon our sense of the haptic, or our sense of touch. When I paint an image, the brush follows the interior contours of the form. It is as if I am tracing the surface of the volume of the image with my brush.... feeling it in space. The final effect produced depends upon the angle of light refraction and the position of the viewer; when you move the picture changes. I believe I have made a new way to think about painting.”

Karen Gunderson was born in Racine, Wisconsin. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Wisconsin State University, Whitewater and both a Master of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa, Iowa City in painting and intermedia respectively. She has been the subject of numerous one-person shows throughout the United States and in Madrid, Spain and Sophia, Bulgaria. Gunderson also had a one person show in the National museum in the capital of Manama in the kingdom of Bahrain. She has received many honors and awards, most notably a Lorenzo Magnifico Prize in Painting at the 2001 Florence Biennale, Italy. She has been named by noted critic Donald Kuspit as one of the New Old Masters and was included in the New Old Masters show at the Abbots Palace in Gdansk, Poland.