RON GORCHOV

(1930-2020)

Music

Footnotes

Provenance
Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan.
Private collection, US (acquired from the above in 1979).
Sale: Phillips, New York, Unbound: Online Only, October 30, 2018, Lot 21.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Exhibited
Birmingham, Michigan, Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ron Gorchov: Recent Paintings, May 21 - June 18, 1977.



In 1975 and 1977, Ron Gorchov was selected for consecutive Whitney Biennials. It was a significant moment for the artist, coming nearly a decade after he produced his first curved canvas, Mine, in 1968. An epiphanic painting, his sculptural turn was the culmination of years of study and experimentation, achieving a unity of forces in his mature work that emerged fully in the 1970s. Presented here is Gorchov's Music, from 1976; an arching canvas of richly tropical-blue, broken by two eyelets of blackened pigment. Imposing Abstract Expressionist subjectivity upon the tensegrity structures of Buckminster Fuller, his paintings were unlike anything produced before. As Roberta Smith commented in 2005, the late 1970s were when Gorchov was "most visible [...] when he started pushing American abstract painting away from Minimalist austerity toward something more explicitly expressionistic" (Roberta Smith, 'Art in Review: Ron Gorchov,' New York Times, June 10, 2005, Online).

Gorchov speaks in a vocabulary of minimalism, yet the painting rebuffs any reading of it in purely formalist terms. Like the comparable 1974 work, Comet, that resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Untitled #3 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the psychological undertones of the twin composition in the present work are abundant. Read as an interpretation of our binocular vision – the two 'holes' through which we glimpse the veil of reality – Music presents as a kind of mask or face returning an inspecting gaze back at the spectator; others have likened these vertically-oriented works to warrior's shields. In the elegant and restrained compositions of these large format works from the 1970s, the pair of flat 'eyes' exhibit characteristics not wholly unlike a Rorschach inkblot test, testing the spectator with an imaginative visual scheme. It is this slippery, undefinable quality that bestows a thrilling sense of presence upon Gorchov's canvases, and Music in particular.

Successfully navigating the mystified space between painting and sculpture, Gorchov's iconic hyperbolic paraboloid canvases are monolithic. Their shape, seeming to conform to our ocularly sense, at once envelops us and falls away from our plane of vision. Whilst his work might be most simply associated with that of Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, or Ellsworth Kelly, artists for whom color, form and line had a relational quality that was intrinsic to the work of art, Gorchov's canvases deviated from formalist rule. In their impinging presence and organic compositions there is an undeniable humanism at their core, representing a spiritual break from the hard-edged rigor of his peers. Perhaps the closest equivalent to Gorchov's work is the early paintings of Donald Judd, who himself was wrestling to extrapolate painting through sheer sculptural force, ultimately disengaging from specific painterly concerns by 1963. As Judd noted in a statement published in Art in America in July 1967, "a form that's neither geometric nor organic would be a great discovery" (Donald Judd in "Homage to the Square," Art in America, July/August 1967). With Gorchov's 1968 breakthrough and subsequent refinement of this novel painterly form through the 1970s, he had arguably achieved what Judd could not.

Coming from an immensely significant period of output and prominence for the artist, therefore, Music is an exceptional example of Gorchov's famed curved canvases from this key first decade of his mature career.