LOS ANGELES, CA.- Wilding Cran Gallery presenting Being Home, an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Gunderman.
With this exhibition, Gunderman explores the deep, often unseen mechanisms of the natural world through large - scale, vividly hued canvases that transform overlooked moments - an owl’s eye, a sprouting seed, a horizon line - into profound meditations on life, time, and transformation. Using rich, contrasting colors and recurring circular motifs, Gunderman dissolves traditional distinctions between landscape, symbol, and diagram, inviting viewers into an immersive visual language where boundaries are always in flux.
Gunderman’s approach to painting is one of close observation and poetic inquiry. Drawing from his encounters with the land—whether a bear crossing his property or the barely perceptible shift of a horizon - he avoids the grand or dramatic in favor of the nascent and emergent. In works like Seed (2025), the entire life cycle is compressed into a single form, capturing a moment of becoming that is both microscopic and immense. Each piece begins with a word, not as a title but as a generative root, unfolding into visual meditations on growth, perception, and the quiet complexity of ecological life. The color fields bleed into one another - yellows into blues and greys, purples into oranges, creams, and blacks - echoing the slow, organic spread of life across a landscape.
Hovering between abstraction and representation, Gunderman’s paintings evoke the tone of scientific diagrams or symbolic maps rather than literal depictions. Circular forms recur as stand-ins for planets, particles, and units of time. In Owl (2025), the bird's oversized yellow eye dominates the composition, its pupil, drawn from a background wash of midnight blue, reflects an uncanny convergence of inner vision and cosmic awareness. While in Sprout (2025), two overlapping circles swirl with jewel tones, partially framed by red lines that act as both horizon and threshold. The work evokes the origin point of life, with echoes of the same colors appearing both above and below the horizon - suggesting a mirrored continuity between earth and sky, inner and outer, seed and bloom.
Within Being Home, Gunderman continues his long-standing engagement with land, labor, and the systems that bind them. The exhibition’s title speaks to this rootedness - not in a fixed sense of place, but in an ongoing dialogue between environment and imagination. Through rich color palettes and quietly transformative imagery, the works offer a meditation on how life begins, how it evolves, and how attention to the smallest details can reveal the most profound truths. In doing so, Gunderman extends an invitation: to see more deeply, to feel more fully, and to dwell - however briefly - in moments of wonder.
Robert Gunderman (USA, b. 1963) Recent solo exhibitions include Place Like You, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Quiet Beliefs, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; This End, AF Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Mollusk Half-Sisters, Rude Drawing, Los Angeles, CA, and Never Let Us Go, Desert Center, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include Surface Streets, curated by Russel Ferguson, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Ripe, Harper’s, Los Angeles, 2 Person Show with Tracy Grayson, BravinLee Programs, New York, NY; LA ON FIRE curated by Michael Slenske, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and Between Worlds, Edward Cella, Los Angeles, CA. In 1992 he co-founded FOOD HOUSE, an alternative art space in Santa Monica, followed by ACME, an influential artist-run space that opened in 1994. Robert Gunderman lives and works near Fillmore CA, in the Santa Clara River Valley just north of Los Angeles.
