The Shade Between at Maruani Mercier

Ron Gorchov's third solo exhibition at Maruani Mercier titled The Shade Between, exhibits twenty works.

Bridging sculpture and abstract painting, Gorchov has developed a singular artistic vocabulary over his decades of practice. His oil on linen paintings pair one or two biomorphic colored shapes against differently colored backgrounds, in addition to hanging his work on a shaped canvas stretcher that is at once concave and convex, a shape critics have compared to shields or saddles. Gorchov belongs to a generation of painters who removed their canvases from the rectangular stretcher, seeking a new pictorial field, yet he is unique in his ability to unite form and content while preserving their tensions. Critic Robert C. Morgan wrote of Gorchov that he does not paint to make a point: “Rather he simply states that the convex saddle is closer to how we perceive than the hardened rectangle. This is the given in his work, and he moves ahead from there, often with extraordinarily lyrical results.

Gorchov’s paintings are included in renowned collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Detroit Institutes of Art, Michigan; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Everson Museum of Art, New York.