Ron Gorchov
Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of two exhibitions, Ron Gorchov: Luck, and Rene Ricard: and if you arrive, do you know you are there? on December 29, 2025 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the St. Moritz gallery. The shows are a tribute to two artists who helped shape the gallery’s history and vision.
“It’s an honor to be able to celebrate our tenth anniversary in St. Moritz with two artists who have been such an important part of the gallery since the beginning. Both Rene and Ron helped form the way I think about art. It’s been an extremely impactful ten years since I took over the gallery space from Bruno Bischofberger, and I’m looking forward to what’s to come in the future.” – Vito Schnabel
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Ron Gorchov (1930–2020) began working with curved surface paintings in 1967, when he created his first curved canvas in Mark Rothko’s studio. Gorchov was best known for helping to spearhead the shaped canvas movement as part of a group of New York artists in the 1960s and ‘70s that included Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Blinky Palermo, and Ellsworth Kelly. Gorchov sought a new dimension in painting through his gently curved stretchers that bow inward and out, creating a volumetric, topological space. Each painting confronts the relationship between the perceived object, the space around it, and the viewer’s psychological experience. As noted critic and curator Robert Storr avers, Gorchov’s paintings “subject the act of looking.”
Vito Schnabel first met Ron Gorchov in New York in the early 2000s, and immediately gravitated toward the saddle-shaped canvases he viewed in the artist’s studio. Though separated by more than a half-century in age, the two men formed a close bond, and in 2005, Gorchov’s paintings became the subject of the first solo exhibition Schnabel organized. At the time, Gorchov’s work had not been presented publicly in over a decade, and the small survey ignited resurgent interest in the artist’s work and his place in the evolution of postwar American painting. The following year, MoMA PS1 hosted a solo exhibition of the artist’s work. An independent spirit who had consistently pushed the boundaries of what a painting could be, Gorchov became an inspiration for a new generation of young painters. Since their first collaboration, Schnabel has organized ten solo presentations of the artist’s work, in New York, St. Moritz, Miami, and London.
Ron Gorchov: Luck, the second solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery’s St. Moritz location, will feature six of his signature shaped canvases dating from 1975 to 2017.
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Ron Gorchov: Luck and Rene Ricard: and if you arrive, do you know you are there? have both been organized in collaboration with the artists’ estates, which the gallery represents. The exhibitions will remain on view through February 14, 2026 in St. Moritz.