IDEELART – Stripping Down the Canvas - Farewell to Ron Gorchov

During a 2017 interview with Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the American painter Ron Gorchov (1930 - 2020) offered the following advice to young artists: “Be desperate and patient.” The seemingly oxymoronic statement perfectly encapsulates the attitude with which Gorchov, who died earlier this month, approached his practice. Born in Chicago in 1930, his family moved city to city more than a dozen times during the Great Depression as his entrepreneurial-minded father sought work. Circumstances may have made them desperate for money, but his father taught Gorchov to see money as separate from purpose. His family was broke, Gorchov says, but never poor. Gorchov worked as a lifeguard when he first moved to New York in the 1950s, and later taught art: jobs which gave him the time he needed to approach his art with the patience it deserved. His guiding principal was that artists should always be making work for the next century, not the century in which they live. His idea for moving painting forward into the 21st century was to combine it, in just the right amounts, with sculpture and architecture. “To me,” Gorchov said, “the essence of sculpture is mass. In architecture, you feel volume. And painting stresses surface.” The “saddle-shaped” paintings for which he became renowned were his solution to the problem. As early as 1949, Gorchov had the notion that the painting world had become too attached to the idea of the rectangle, an attachment hastened by Piet Mondrian, who Gorchov reasoned had exhausted the shape. Gorchov considered various options to alter the flatness of a typical rectangular canvas, such as placing a tennis ball behind it to create a bulge. It took him 19 years to develop the “saddle stretchers” he used to create his now-iconic convex, curved painting surfaces. His first saddle-shaped painting, which he made in 1968, is titled “Mine”—a double entendre referencing the fact that he saw the work as uniquely his, and also saw it as a potential gold mine full of undiscovered creative possibilities.