The final results are both vitally painterly and profoundly elegiac, intensely virtuosic and utterly elemental.  The series of nine “night sunflowers” at hand are the most ambitious Gundersons to date.  Can flowers grow in the dark?  Not most.  But what about sunflowers?  Here, in these lyric, heroic black canvases, this species more than must maintains; it flourishes, in wild, wet, wonderful daubs of thick pigment, heavy impasto, and judicious gestural abandon.  They absorb light; they deflect light; they reflect light.  Just so, metaphorically, they reject the economic, social, cultural and political darkness that seems, in these beleaguered, millennial ‘90s, to be affecting so many of us.  Gunderson’s flowers don’t give in:  They aestherically advise against a reactive depression, and strongly advise for a resolute hope.  That is their nature;  That is perhaps their purpose; and that is their very being.  Gunderson’s existential nocturnes are a surprise, a puzzlement, and a wonder, much like life itself, now or then.  Finally, in her hands, black becomes a color.
                                                                       

Gerrit Henry
Spring 1994
New York, New York