Cheim & Read is pleased to present our first online viewing room in conjunction with our inaugural exhibition, ron gorchov: at the cusp of the 80s, paintings 1979–1983. This online presentation offers an overview of Gorchov’s work, which can be classified into two types: saddles and stacks.

The first are the shield or saddle-like shaped paintings. Gorchov developed his signature format, in the late 1960s, by dipping wire forms in liquid that would eventually harden and become rigid (see below, GOSSIP, 1976). In the mid-1970s, the artist re-emerged after a hiatus from exhibiting his work publicly, and presented these early efforts stretching linen across a wooden saddle-shaped stretcher. Some paintings featured two keyhole-like figures side by side on a monochromatic ground, a motif the artist would return to over and over for the rest of his life. One example from this decade is COMET, 1974, in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Other series of works, such as the group of paintings on view at Cheim & Read, explore more pictorial methods of painting, with gestural brushstrokes and imagistic space. Over the intervening fifty years, Gorchov has continued to make paintings using this distinctive shaped canvas.