Sonia Gechtoff

Sonia Gechtoff (September 25, 1926 – February 1, 2018) was an American abstract expressionist painter. Her primary medium was painting, but she also created drawings and prints.

Early life and education Sonia Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia to Ethel "Etya" and Leonid Gechtoff. Her father was a highly successful genre artist from Odesa, Ukraine. He introduced his daughter to painting and "had [her] sit beside him at his easel with a brush and paints and beginning at age six he was there to spur [her] on".

Career In 1951, Gechtoff relocated to San Francisco, sharing her social and professional life with Bay Area artists such as Hassel Smith, Philip Roeber, Madeline Dimond, Ernest Briggs, Elmer Bischoff, Byron McClintock, and Deborah Remington. She was immersed in the heady culture of the San Francisco Bay Area Beat Generation. According to Gechtoff, female abstract expressionists in San Francisco (such as Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Deborah Remington, and Lilly Fenichel) did not face the same discrimination as their New York counterparts. After moving she studied lithography with James Budd Dixon at what is now called the San Francisco Art Institute. Many of her works, like The Angel (1953–55), are abstracted self-portraits. Gechtoff used vibrant colors and thick, energetic brushstrokes to suggest a central figure whose arms stretch across the picture plane.

Later in her career, after moving to New York, Gechtoff began drawing inspiration from the Brooklyn Bridge, classical architecture, and the sea, whose forms are recognizable in her later series of collage-like paintings.

In 1993, Gechtoff was elected to the National Academy of Design. Gechtoff was also the recipient of the 2013 Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award.

Gechtoff's work was included in the 1954 exhibition Younger American Painters at the Guggenheim, the 1958 Brussels World Fair, USA Pavilion, "17 American Painters", the 1977 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Extraordinary Women', and the 2016 exhibit "Women of Abstract Expressionism" at the Denver Art Museum,

In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Solo Exhibitions

Group Exhibitions + Year San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York Whitney Museum, New York, New York Menil Collection, Houston, Texas