Karen Gunderson clearly knows much of the significance of the king. Her current exhibition at Donahue/Sosinski presents five large oil paintings of historical kings, along with 10 small panel paintings that isolate and display visual motifs drawn from the larger works. Each of the five kings was selected as a moral exemplar—King David, 1993 as the moral light of his people; King Alfred The Great, 1998 for promoting learning during the Dark Ages; King Boris III, 1998 (of Bulgaria) and Danish King, 1993 (King Christian) for resisting the Nazi slaughter of the Jews; and King Louis XIV, 1998 as a proponent of the arts.

The exhibition is also Gunderson’s second presentation of her black paintings—figurative works painted entirely in black, a technique she has been developing for 10 years. Gunderson’s method for making the figures evident to the eye, her manipulation of the darkest of pigments, the color of darkness itself, is something I have not seen before, and constitutes a stunning accomplishment—a unique style of painting.

She employs a variety of blacks to obtain a range of differing values, or darknesses, but their differences do not account for the evidence of the figures, which are as clearly visible as they would be had she illustrated them with a full palette. Rather, she scores the black field using only her brush, covering it with patterns of lightly incised lines that determine the planes and surfaces of the image by their direction and movement, much as one would in an engraving. But the visual effect is entirely different. Engraving’s line work reveals the white of the paper; Gunderson’s scoring of black paint opens only onto more black. What the scoring also does is direct the reflected light. In essence, the scoring choreographs the paintings’ sheen, creating the image as a function of pure, white light. The image arises from a background that seems to have the richness and density of black satin, a mysterious space of a velvet texture. The image literally glows, exists as a shimmer, almost hovers in the air between the work and the viewer.

Gunderson’s strict employment of pure black makes the inevitable reference to the work of Ad Reinhardt. But whereas Reinhardt presumed the faintest configuration of the simplest geometry, Gunderson pulls forth the human figure of the fully developed self; where Reinhardt drew the viewer into the heart of a mystery, Gunderson raises the recognizable figure up and out of the backdrop of a mystery; where Reinhardt saw a separation between art and life, Gunderson finds life within her art.