Artist: Ron Gorchov

Mitterrand | St-Honoré presents a new exhibition of works by American artist Ron Gorchov.

Ron Gorchov belongs to a generation of painters who broke with the traditional rectangular frame in the 1960s, establishing a new link between sculpture and abstract painting. As part of a group of New York artists including Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Blinky Palermo and Ellsworth Kelly, Gorchov challenged the physical limits of painting. It was in 1967, in Mark Rothko's studio, that he created his first curved canvas. Since then, Gorchov contributed to the emergence and development of shaped canvas in the history of twentieth-century painting. His works are characterized by the use of curved wooden frames reminiscent of a horse's saddle or a shield. On the linen canvases stretched over the deliberately sculptural frames, Gorchov tirelessly reiterates abstract motifs inspired by ancient Greek sculptures, which he varies through a multitude of chromatic experiments.

The works presented at Mitterrand | St-Honoré provide a glimpse of these formal explorations, carried out between 1970 and 2020. The tension applied to the stretcher, which becomes concave or convex, frees the pictorial surface from a number of spatial and material constraints. The real depth of the canvas reinforces the dialogue between the biomorphic forms in contrast with the background and create an illusionary effect. The work is no longer fixed; the forms float on the surface of the composition and seem to detach themselves from their support. As Gorchov said in an interview, his aesthetic ideal would be to free himself from gravity and see the work floating freely in space[1]. A detachment that reflects a complete state of mind, or even a philosophy, as the artist said himself: ‘My paintings are mainly made up of daydreams and luck’[2].

Ron Gorchov was born in 1930 in Chicago (IL) and died in 2020 in Brooklyn (NY). His paintings are a part of many important collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Everson Museum of Art, New York.

[1] Ron Gorchov, Maruani Mercier, Bruxelles, 2017
[2] Ron Gorchov in interview with Robert Storr and Phong Bui, September 2006