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. In 1944, at the age of fourteen, he was invited to take Saturday classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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. 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. In 2006, Gorchov's recent works were included in a solo show at PS1 entitled "Ron Gorchov: Double Trouble".

After that, the artist had solo shows at Nicholas Robinson Gallery, New York (2008); Atlantic Center of Modern Art (Spanish: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (2011); Thomas Brambilla gallery, Bergamo, Italy (2015, 2018–2019).

Death and legacy Gorchov died on August 18, 2020, in Red Hook, Brooklyn at the age of 90. the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His second marriage was to Karen Chaplin, and ended in divorce in 1967. He was married to Marilyn Lenkowsky, and divorced in 1975; followed by a marriage to Sharma Bennett and a divorce in 1979. In 2012, he married Veronika Sheer, and the marriage ended with his death in 2020.