Clint Roenisch Gallery

Artists/Harold Klunder

Harold Klunder is one of Canada’s leading painters. He has exhibited constantly for more than three decades since his first solo show at Sable-Castelli Gallery in 1976. Born in The Netherlands in 1943 Harold Klunder emigrated to Canada in 1952. He maintains three studios in Montreal, Flesherton (Ontario) and Pouch Cove (Newfoundland). His paintings are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, MuseumLondon and the Winnipeg Art Gallery among many others. He uses a refined vocabulary of forms that are uniquely his to suggest ideas of vitality and transformation, of biology and duration, of identities that are mutable and of the still-unfolding history of painting itself. Klunder works on single paintings for years at a time and in so doing they become invested with a palpable sense of lived experience and vivid evidence of his effort to give shape to consciousness itself. In his recent, definitive book “Abstract Painting In Canada” Roald Nasgaard wrote that “A sense of the history of art (at least back to the seventeenth century) pervades Klunder’s work, but not in any derivative or historicist way. His are no postmodern exercises of appropriation but something entirely internalized and personalized.”