To do so, she first had to invent a painting technique that would defy the optical truth that black is non-reflective.  Take a closer look at “Small Sunflower.”  Its grays represent a photographer’s best attempt to render a monochrome painting his light meter thinks is an oil slick.  What we see as light and tone, in fact, are the faint but shiny reflections of light across the slender ridges of Gunderson’s brushstrokes.  To give them shape, she has to lay down strokes as delicately as if she were painting the actual petals and leaves instead of a canvas.  The volumes are simplified, almost naïve, modeled in parallel lines like a satin-stitch crewel.  No slips of the hand are allowed—or else, scrape out and start over.  The result is eerily luminous, like an X-ray hologram.

The question, to repeat, is why? “I wanted a chance to revisit images…to experience them anew,” Gunderson says in explanation.  Sunflowers were a provocative choice, the poster child of Impressionism, the school that banished black.  Van Gogh claimed them as his special theme, fellow creatures fatally attracted to the sun.  To paint a sunflower stalk glimmering in a lightless abyss takes conviction, an unwavering eye and the kind of courage particular to artists and acrobats.

John T. Spike is the director of the Florence International Biennial of Contemporary Art.