Review: 'Ron Gorchov: Exploring the Near/Far Painterly Horizons of Modern Space'

Vito Schnabel’s Ron Gorchov retrospective, curated by Robert Storr, Exploring the Near/Far Painterly Horizons of Modern Space, excavates works from the late artist’s studio, punctuating them with some of Gorchov’s most important saddle-shaped canvases. Although Gorchov’s works are not presented historically, the show is a monumental tour through his oeuvre, affirming that his name ought to resound alongside post-painterly abstractionists like Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, and Jules Olitski.

A 1960 letter from Gorchov can be found in the papers of the influential modernist painter and theorist John D. Graham. Gorchov, who was an ardent reader and acolyte of Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art (1937), writes that “other theories and knowledge give me an interesting but useless view of my life.…And now all you have taught me is beginning to come out in unexpected ways in my painting." In a later letter dated May 8, 1961, Gorchov remarks, “I do not find any writer who puts things as clearly and brilliantly as what you have spoken to me.” What, precisely, was it that Graham imparted to Gorchov? In a passage that also apparently interested Gorchov, Graham asks whether painting is, “a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional proposition?” He concludes that, by virtue of the structure of the canvas, painting is two-dimensional and that for this reason the painter ought to orient themselves towards this basic flatness. But Graham differs from other influential modernists like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried in that he saw the telos of painting as oriented not only towards a medium-specific essence but also subject matter—for Graham, painting was a project of dissemblance, insofar as it could never truly reproduce reality.