John Gundelfinger

Gundelfinger immigrated to the United States at age two. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and at New York University, and in 1963 he returned to the School of Visual Arts as an instructor of painting and drawing. Since 1971, he has also taught at the Parsons School of design. Known primarily as a painter of misty landscapes—the Delaware water gap is a favorite site—Gundelfinger is less concerned with the geography of his scenes than with mood, atmosphere, and the changing perception of time created by subtly altering light and color. An admitted heir of both J. M. W. Turner and Willem de Kooning, Gundelfinger is fascinated with the implicit position of the viewer within the landscape and with the changing relationships among landscape elements afforded by very small adjustments of viewpoint. At the core of his art is the re-creation of experience: from visible and objective to invisible and subjective.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)