Amanda Gruenwald’s painting practice was transformed by her move, as a young artist, from Wellington to Auckland, where she was struck by the area’s clear, crystalline light. As she states, “Every leaf, branch and building façade seems delineated… the light is bouncing and refracting, coating everything it hits with a glimmering layer.” In her works commissioned for Cordis Auckland, Gruenwald foregrounds this intensity, ‘this glimmering layer’, with each work staining the retina or soaking the body with a flood of movement in the vibrant colours of Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau.

Located throughout the hotel, Gruenwald’s paintings immerse the viewer in their senses, creating an impression of place that evokes the way it feels to live in and inhabit Tāmaki Makaurau. The works invite the guest into a sense of place that is sensory and intuitive; her canvases envelop the viewer affectively, summoning the dynamic forces of nature into the hotel.

To create her works, Gruenwald uses a range of techniques, including pouring paint, brushing it and scraping it. Mixing the paint herself, her process is highly activated, as she removes paintwork and generates reactions, which she then layers with an infinite range of individually mixed colours and tones. Gruenwald’s painterly approach denies surface depth and flattens perspective, with contrasting brushwork that obscures and diverts attention, so as to bounce the viewer back to the intensely luminous surfaces of her canvases.

Gruenwald attributes the amplified impressionistic light quality within Tāmaki Makaurau to its proximity to the water - the harbours are visible from multiple vantage points. The sharp, reflective quality of the light heightens colour and infuses the air with a clarity that Gruenwald transmutes into her compositions. Her works are typified by a harmonious tussle between colour and opacity, which intersects, bleeds and layers, so that each work is an oscillation of forms dictated by its own interior logic. The paintings become like imprints of the sun’s radiant spectrum, with smears of nature depicted in Gruenwald’s dynamic tumbling brushwork and undulating forms that generate a sense of momentum within the frame, connecting the guest sensorily with the natural world beyond.

Her paintings are located in the Lobby Lounge, Executive Lounge and the Chairman’s Suite, and prints of her works are hung in many of the guest rooms.

Photography: Sam Hartnett. Images courtesy of the artist.