Harold Klunder, Sun And Moon IV, 2008-2009, oil on linen, 114”x78”, courtesy Clint Roenisch.
By David Liss
During the rise of neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s, then Toronto painter Harold Klunder established a reputation as one of Canada’s leading figures of the era, with huge-scale, intensely colored, densely impasto paintings of imaginatively constructed forms that hovered at the cusp of figuration and abstraction. As the winds of fashion shifted in the early 1990s and painting had (again) slipped from favor, Klunder’s profile too was eclipsed by emerging trends and the onslaught of upcoming generations, although the strength and authenticity of his practice was never diminished. Within the last few years, however, a number of exhibitions at various institutions and commercial galleries across the country have once again thrust the now Montreal-based Klunder into the forefront of current Canadian painting. Given the consistency that he has sustained throughout his entire career, and the quality of recent exhibitions, including his latest at the Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto, many are now considering Klunder to be one of Canada’s best living painters. Looking at the work of any number of younger Canadian painters, his influence cannot be underestimated. His current work is vibrant, fresh and attuned to the pulse and relevancy of current global painting. If not for the confidence and maturity of his paint handling and a complex pictorial sophistication, viewers could not be faulted for assuming that these are the works of the next young hot-shot from Brooklyn or Berlin.
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