Witch

“The curved support is a very general realization of my experience in space.”

Ron Gorchov’s breakthrough on the New York art scene came in 1960, when he was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Young America 1960: Thirty Painters Under Thirty-Six. By 1969 he had completed his first painting on a concave canvas. Gorchov progressively altered the stretcher’s shape, ultimately finding his signature in the shield-shaped support that is both concave and convex. Double motifs of varying biomorphic, organic shapes, sometimes almost mirroring each other, float on the often loosely painted monochromatic background. Witch is an example of this. Gorchov adopted an ambidextrous way of painting, using his left hand for the left side and then switching to his right hand for the other side.