Robert Gunderman
Within and Around

February 1 , 2020 – March 1, 2020

Ten years ago, my wife and I moved to a ranch in Ventura County. There were a few hundred trees on the property when we arrived, and I’ve planted an additional 600 over the last several years. The German Forester Peter Wohlleben recognized the behavioral characters of trees, how they communicate through chemical signals, nurture each other when sick, and share similar characteristics as animals. Recently, the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has elaborated on Alexander Gurwitsch’s early 20th century findings relating to Morphogenetic Fields. Sheldrake proposes that a cell’s growth is determined by developmental information inherited from fields outside the cell, and there’s a memory inherent in nature.

Since living on the ranch, I’ve made paintings that give human characteristics to the organisms that surround me...images of insects, animals and the sun with fingers and faces. It’s a quiet place where all living things communicate and care for each other.

The paintings in this exhibition refer to my interests in these fields of information, as well as early 20th century (often French) painting made around the time of Gurwitsch’s aforementioned work. I imagine the fan shapes as fields that contain information necessary to heal and repair the damage inflicted upon the natural world.

– Robert Gunderman