Ron Gorchov (1930-2020). Agron, 2012. Oil on shaped linen. 65 x 55 x 13 inches (165.1 x 139.7 x 33.0...

Description

Ron Gorchov (1930-2020)
Agron, 2012
Oil on shaped linen
65 x 55 x 13 inches (165.1 x 139.7 x 33.0 cm)
Titled, dated, and inscribed on stretcher: AGRON MMXII / 11/7/12

Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

PROVENANCE:
Cheim & Read, New York;
Private collection, New York;
Private collection, New York.

EXHIBITED:
Cheim & Read, New York, "Ron Gorchov," March - April 2012;
Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Finland, "Ron Gorchov," October 25-November 17, 2013.

Ron Gorchov's Agron is a commanding meditation on color, tension, and spatial rhythm, exemplifying the artist's lifelong pursuit of painting as a living, breathing structure. Against a field of velvety black, two blue biomorphic forms hover in quiet suspension, their edges softened by the gentle curvature of the support. The composition feels both architectural and atmospheric and at once shield and portal, vessel and void. The shaped linen surface, bowed outward like a saddle or shield, draws the viewer into an enveloping visual field that refuses to remain static. Here, painting becomes not a flat illusion but an event in space, a charged meeting of pigment, plane, and perception.

Born in Chicago in 1930, Gorchov emerged within the crucible of postwar abstraction, developing a singular voice that stood apart from the gestural work of his contemporaries. After early experiments within the language of the New York School, he broke definitively with the rectangle in the late 1960s, devising his distinctive curved stretcher-a concave/convex support that fused painting and sculpture. This invention liberated his work from the picture plane, enabling color and shape to operate in true dimensional space. For Gorchov, this formal innovation carried metaphysical weight: it redefined the act of seeing as a bodily, almost spiritual experience, where perception unfolds through movement and light rather than static observation.

By the time he created Agron in 2012, Gorchov had refined this language into a state of serene confidence. The work's saturated hues recall the chromatic intensity of late Matisse, while its biomorphic pairing evokes primordial dualities-presence and absence, body and breath, figure and field. The blue shapes, elongated and imperfectly mirrored, seem to pulse against the dark ground, their drips suggesting both gravity and release. Light grazes the edges of the curved canvas, animating the pigment and creating a subtle optical vibration that shifts with the viewer's position.

Agron thus encapsulates the core paradox of Gorchov's art: the union of discipline and spontaneity, of rigor and lyricism. His color harmonies are simple yet resonant, carrying emotional and spatial charge far beyond their formal restraint. The shaped canvas becomes a stage for equilibrium and rupture alike.

Within its sculptural curvature and chromatic economy, Agron achieves a quiet grandeur. It invites the viewer into an encounter not of depiction but of sensation, an awareness of how form can hold emotion, and how the act of seeing might itself become an act of contemplation. In its distilled balance of shape, color, and curvature, the work stands as both a culmination of Gorchov's lifelong inquiry and a testament to painting's enduring capacity to transcend its frame.


Estimate: $100,000 - $150,000.

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