Harold Klunder, one of Canada’s most respected contemporary painters, creates dazzling process-based gestural paintings and prints. Klunder was born in 1943 in Deventer, the Netherlands, and moved to Canada when he was nine years old. Raised outside of Hamilton, he moved to Toronto in 1960, and for the next four years studied art at the Central Technical School. In 1976 Klunder had his first major solo show at Sable-Castelli Gallery in Toronto. His early work featured angular shapes within shallow abstract spaces, covered with freehand strokes and an array of drips and splatters. His work in the 1980s brought the refinement of a unique style, as he developed large-scale paintings with a more vivid palette of warm colours, and bolder impasto mark making dominated by thick black organic swirls. This was a time of rapid career advancement for Klunder, as he began exhibiting widely throughout Canada as well as internationally. He quickly became recognized as one of the key artists associated with Neo-expressionist painting in Canada. As he gradually moved away from geometric abstraction, his paintings began to appear more sculptural and figurative, and some critics found a strong connection to the confident, gestural mark making of Dutch painters such as Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh and Willem de Kooning.

Klunder’s approach to painting is reminiscent of an artist from a different epoch, where process, constant editing and long studio hours are the norm. He works tirelessly - some of his paintings take years to complete, and even then they seem to be in the state of becoming. Klunder’s work features globs and streaks of paint that coalesce into shapes reminiscent of a face, before dissolving into topographic washes and drips reminiscent of landscape. Ultimately, the face seems inescapable in his work, and his oeuvre is often recognized as expressionist self-portraiture. Klunder’s work is never static - it seems to funnel a whole history of painting and of lived experience, including the everyday and the banal (according to Klunder he is influenced by everything, even what he sees on television or in a store). More importantly, his work seems to reveal something deeply personal, perhaps the unconscious itself.
Klunder has exhibited his work extensively in Canada, the United States, Australia, Japan and China. His work is included in many permanent collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. In 1983 he was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.