Harold Klunder: The Dance of Life

January 24, 2026 - April 18, 2026

Harold Klunder, Pipe Dreams, 1994 - 1995. Oil on burlap, 81 x 71.5 cm. Gift from the artist, 1998.

Harold Klunder’s process mirrors the cycles of life itself: paintings are born, built, torn apart, and rebuilt through layers of gesture, accumulation, revision, and time. Often painted over the course of several years, these works hover between abstraction and figuration, shaped as much by intuition as by lived experience. Since 1980, Klunder has used figuration—particularly the self-portrait—as a touchstone for exploring the inner psyche and the collective unconscious. His paintings pulse with dissonant, jazz-like rhythms and are structured by an underlying compositional architecture, holding beauty and darkness, chaos and order, joy and anguish, in a provocative tension that reflects the full spectrum of human experience.

The Dance of Life brings together paintings from more than seven decades of Klunder’s fervent and deeply committed practice, placing works created decades apart in conversation with one another through key loans and selections from the Gallery’s collection. Rather than following a linear chronological narrative, the exhibition presents his career as a living continuum, where past and present continually inform one another, revealing a vision that moves forward while remaining self-referential and deeply authentic.

Opening Reception: Saturday January 24, 2026 from 2:00pm to 4:00pm