Provenance:

Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:

Cliff Eyland, Harold Klunder. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg, 1999, page 4.

Note:

Time is as much an element of the paintings of Harold Klunder (b.1943) as subject or medium. While his watercolours are completed quickly, his oil paintings are often done over a number of years and in this way his own lived experience and changing sensibilities are contained in the work.

Towing the line between figurative imagery, abstraction and expressionism, over his extensive career, Klunder has seen many modes, trends and iterations of abstraction come and go. Since the duration of time is so critical to his artistic practice, a single painting can illustrate a multitude of aesthetic changes, ultimately making his work so compelling and challenging to categorise.

Klunder has said that "I am influenced by everything; what I find on the street, what I see in stores, on TV, etc. I love the look of things and what the look hides. I love the idiosyncratic, the boring, banal everyday stuff, the things that fill our every moment, moment-to-moment...everything at once all the time..." His fascination with the ephemeral is captured through his own particular abstracted lens, paradoxically cementing this brevity in a dynamic but ultimately fixed image on the canvas. Everything has to end at some point, and what we see in Klunder’s paintings is the recognition, confrontation and ultimate concession to the indiscriminate passage of time.