Ron Gorchov

Ron Gorchov (1930–2020) was an American painter whose curved, saddle-shaped canvases — at once concave and convex — gave abstract painting a sculptural presence that few of his contemporaries attempted. Born in Chicago on 5 April 1930, he was invited at fourteen to Saturday classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and went on to study at the University of Mississippi (1947–48), Roosevelt College and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (1948), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1950–51).

In 1953 he moved to New York with his wife and newborn son, supporting himself as a lifeguard while he painted. His breakthrough came in 1960, when he was included in the Whitney Museum’s Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty and held his first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which showed him again in 1963 and 1966. In those years he befriended the painter John D. Graham, and later moved in the circle of Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle and Ellsworth Kelly.

In the late 1960s Gorchov began the work for which he is known: oil on linen stretched over curved, saddle-like stretchers, usually carrying one or two biomorphic shapes on a ground of a different colour. The first of these shaped canvases was made in Mark Rothko’s studio. In the early 1970s he extended the idea into multi-panelled, stacked paintings, and in 1971–72 exhibited the monumental Set, Entrance and Strand at the Everson Museum in Syracuse. Against the flatness that Clement Greenberg’s criticism had made orthodox, Gorchov insisted that a painting was also an object in space.

After decades on the margins of the market he was rediscovered in the 2000s: a survey at MoMA PS1 in 2006 was followed by solo exhibitions at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas (2011) and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2014), and by late-career representation with Cheim & Read, Vito Schnabel, Galerie Max Hetzler and Maruani Mercier. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He died in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on 18 August 2020, aged ninety.