Ron Gorchov
Ron Gorchov (April 5, 1930 – August 18, 2020) was an American artist. He was known for his colorful, abstract paintings on curved canvases. In the late 1960s, he began making oil-on-linen paintings on distinctive saddle-like stretchers, at once concave and convex, featuring one or two biomorphic shapes against differently colored backgrounds. These, along with the multi-paneled, "stacked" paintings, which Gorchov began making in the early 1970s, are to this day the primary support structure for the artist's work. Bridging sculpture and abstract painting, Gorchov's singular artistic vocabulary challenged the methodologies of traditional painting. Works by Gorchov have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, among other institutions. His works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Guggenheim, among others. Education and early years Ron Gorchov was born on April 5, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. In 1944, at the age of fourteen, he was invited to take Saturday classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Many of his fellow students, who were servicemen returning from World War II, who had used the G.I. Bill benefits to pay for art materials. Gorchov remembered in a 2006 interview, "a veteran named Jered Hoffman gave me a paper bag with all his half-squeezed oil paint tubes and a whole bunch of old brushes and he said they'd be good luck". Gorchov attended the University of Mississippi from 1947 to 1948. In 1948, he returned to Chicago and attended the Roosevelt College (now Roosevelt University), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; followed by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois, in 1950 to 1951. New York City In 1953, Gorchov moved to New York City with his wife Joy Gorchov Tomme and newborn son, Michael. The family moved into the Marlton Hotel, across the street from the old location of the Whitney Museum, and what is now the New York Studio School. In the late 1950s, Gorchov developed a friendship with John D. Graham, himself an important influence on such artists as Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock. He also became acquainted with members of this generation of artists largely tied to the Abstract Expressionism movement, including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Knox Martin, and Al Held, among others. Gorchov's break-through on the New York art scene came in 1960, as part of the Whitney Museum's Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under ThirtySix. The same year, Gorchov had his first show with Tibor de Nagy Gallery, followed by two more solo shows in 1963 and 1966. Gorchov became in the late 1960s and early 1970s associated with a group of Manhattan-based abstract artists, such as Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, and Ellsworth Kelly, who rejected the ubiquitous rectangular canvas in favour of new shapes and configurations.