Ron Gorchov

PRESS RELEASE

(St. Moritz, Switzerland)—Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Ron Gorchov titled Concord. The exhibition is the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in Switzerland, and will feature new paintings alongside works from the 1980s. The artist was the subject of the first solo exhibition that Schnabel curated in 2005. At that time, Gorchov’s work had not been presented in over a decade, and the show led to a resurgent interest in the artist’s work, including a solo exhibition the following year at MoMA PS1. 

Gorchov is best known for helping to spearhead the shaped canvas movement with his bowed wooden frames, resembling saddles or shields, stretched with linen or canvas and marked with simple shapes of thin paint providing chromatic contrasts. As part of a group of artists in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s including Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Blinky Palermo and Ellsworth Kelly, Gorchov pushed painting to its extreme, defying Greenbergian formalism. Becoming a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture, the warped edges of Gorchov’s canvases create new dimensions and depth, disorienting the viewer’s perception. 

Robert Storr wrote “[Gorchov] uses simple paired strokes to create images that play with asymmetry within a basically symmetrical design, creating his emblematic doubled or mirrored image.” ("Missing in Action: Robert Storr on Ron Gorchov." Artforum Sept. 2005).

About Ron Gorchov:
Born in 1930 in Chicago, Ron Gorchov is an American artist who has been working with curved surface paintings and shaped canvases since 1967. He created his first shaped canvas work in Mark Rothko’s studio. Major solo exhibitions have been presented at Sotheby’s S|2 (London, UK); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (Missouri); Lesley Heller Workspace (New York, NY); Galerie Forsblom (Helsinki, Finland); Cheim and Read (New York, NY); Galerie Richard (Paris, France), Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (Canary Islands, Spain), MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, NY); Susanne Hilberry Gallery (Ferndale, MI); Jack Tilton Gallery (New York, NY); Texas Gallery (Houston, TX); Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY); and Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York, NY). Gorchov’s paintings are included in many prominent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Guggenheim and the Everson Museum of Art.

About Vito Schnabel:
Vito Schnabel is an independent curator and contemporary art dealer based in New York. He produced his first exhibition in 2003 at the age of 16. Prior to opening the gallery in St. Moritz in 2015, Schnabel presented shows in varied locations such as Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, Switzerland, Acquavella Galleries in New York, a cloistered garden in Venice during the Venice Biennale, photographer Richard Avedon’s former studio, and the Farley Post Office in New York, carefully matching artists’ work with unique and temporary exhibition settings. In February 2015, he curated an exhibition of Ron Gorchov's paintings at Sotheby's S|2 in London, and in May, he presented a group show at the historic Germania Bank Building on the Bowery, which had not been open to the public since the mid-1960s. The exhibition included works by Joe Bradley, Dan Colen, Jeff Elrod, Ron Gorchov, Mark Grotjahn, Harmony Korine, and Julian Schnabel. In addition to the St. Moritz gallery, Schnabel has an office and private exhibition space in New York City where he conducts his daily operations.