Isabel Norsten
Specialist, Head of Sale
Lot 106
SONIA GECHTOFF(1926-2018)Hiroshige Revisited II
15 May 2025, 14:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$35,840 inc. premium
Looking for a similar item?
Our Post-War and Contemporary Art specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistAsk about this lot
Contemporary Art (US)
Rachel Griffith
Sale Coordinator
SONIA GECHTOFF (1926-2018)
Hiroshige Revisited II
signed, inscribed and dated 'Sonia Gechtoff Hiroshige Revisited II 1988' (on the reverse)
acrylic and graphite on canvas
54 x 38 in (137.2 x 96.5 cm)
Painted in 1988
signed, inscribed and dated 'Sonia Gechtoff Hiroshige Revisited II 1988' (on the reverse)
acrylic and graphite on canvas
54 x 38 in (137.2 x 96.5 cm)
Painted in 1988
Footnotes
Provenance
The artist's studio.
Estate of the artist.
Private collection, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
Exhibited
New York, Bortolami Gallery, Sonia Gechtoff: Objects on the New Landscape, January 12 - March 2, 2024.
Born in Philadelphia in 1926 to prominent art world parents, Sonia Gechtoff is recognized as one of the most important female Abstract Expressionist painters. Her mother, Etel Etya, ran the East and West Gallery in San Francisco, and her father, Leonid Gechtoff, was a successful genre artist from Ukraine who introduced Sonia to painting at an early age. After graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1950, Gechtoff moved to San Francisco where she immersed herself in the Bay Area Beat Generation. After an encounter with the works of Clyfford Still, Gechtoff pivoted to abstract painting, to which she would remain dedicated throughout her life.
Gechtoff has been praised for her trailblazing achievements in her distinct painting techniques, including pioneering the use of the palette knife in the early 1950s to sculpt the details and grounds of her painting surfaces. Additionally, she is credited for inventing a process that combined painting and drawing together on a single support in the 1960s, challenging the definition of either classification. This involved inserting exquisitely rendered, detailed drawings onto fully painted canvases, creating a signature style that stretched the limits of the abstract painting category. This inventiveness earned her early recognition, and in 1954 Gechtoff was selected for the prestigious Young American Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, alongside Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock, among other peers. In 1957 she was awarded a solo exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, becoming the first Abstract Expressionist female artist on the East or West coast of the United States to receive a solo show at a major institution. That same year, she was also included in the legendary Ferus Gallery's inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles alongside Still, Richard Diebenkorn, and Jay DeFeo, among others, and two solo exhibitions at the gallery followed within the next two years.
Gechtoff's work was greatly inspired by landscapes and cityscapes, in addition to images from nature, atmospheric perspectives, and outer space. She would often combine organic forms and nature-like elements like fire, smoke, wind, and waves with more rigorously geometric and hard-edge and orb-like structures including circles, spheres, pearls, and moons. Inspired by a love of architecture, she often explored negative space and voids combined with hand-rendering to model forms to create dimensionality and the illusion of space in her canvases. In her later works, more architectural references would emerge as columnar shapes, hints of garden pergolas, portals evocative of the proscenium of a theatre, crashing wave forms, and near tectonic structures emulating bridges, seawalls, and piers, as well as heroic flat surfaces suggesting facades of buildings. These forms however are always imbued with personal memory, capturing these places through her feelings from that locale and moment in time.
In 2013 Sonia Gechtoff was the recipient of the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award. Her works are found in the permanent collections of numerous prestigious institutions across the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Most recently, she was included in the landmark 2023 exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, Action, Gesture Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70.
