It’s been almost a year since Hurricane Sandy wrecked havoc on New York City and much of the East Coast. Artists were effected in a number of devastating ways: from water-clogged homes and studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to decades-worth of work lost in flooded Chelsea galleries. Phong Bui, artist and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail is recognizing this anniversary with Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1, a benefit exhibition that is more in the spirit of celebration and solidarity than somber remembrance. Conceived in partnership with the Dedalus Foundation and Industry City, the show features more than 300 artists, roughly half of whom were directly affected by the storm, across a remarkable range of disciplines and career levels. Bui himself lost years of work and much of the Rail’s archive in his flooded Greenpoint studio. The two-month exhibition will also be the site of  poetry readings, film screenings,  musical performances, talks with conservators, and other cultural events.

Exhibiting artists include: Marina Adams, Susan Bee, Katherine Bradford, Mike Cloud, Cora Cohen, Tamara Gonzales, Ron Gorchov, Josephine Halvorson, EJ Hauser, Michael Joo, Alex Katz, Ronnie Landfield, Chris Martin, Carrie Moyer, Nari Ward, Wendy White, Richard Serra, and newer faces such as Becky Brown, Allison Ginsberg, Heidi Howard, Osamu Kobayashi, Brie Ruais, Gabriela Salazar and Nicole Wittenberg.

The opening of Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1 is Sunday, October 20 from 4 PM to 8 PM.

Industry City is located at 220 36th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The exhibition is open Thursday through Sunday, from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM , and will run from October 20 to December 15, 2013

For more information and a full schedule of events, please  visit: www.cometogethersandy.com, or email: info@dedalusfoundation.org

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It’s always a call for celebration when painter Ron Gorchov’s watercolors are the sole subject of an exhibition. A show of new works on paper, cunningly titled “Curated by Watercolors,” will open Sunday, September 8 at Lesley Heller Workspace. Gorchov’s titles suggest a personal world informed  by Greek mythology, lyric poetry, and ’30s big band music. The attention to surface as a unique support is as evident here as it is in his majestic, saddle-shaped canvases. His technique of mounting the paper so it is not flush with the wall allows each watercolor a curling life of its own. Gorchov’s choice of color is at once hot, dark, and mysterious; lemon yellow, forest green, neon green, and deep cobalt blue are the fruits of hard won victories. Many of the watercolors, like the oil paintings, flirt with the pictorial, describing a twins in space motif, a dance between two parts that once were whole.  Keep dancing, Ron.

Ron Gorchov: Curated by Watercolors at Lesley Heller Worskspace will be on view till October 13, 2013. Lesley Heller is located at 54 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday 11 AM to 6PM, and on Sunday from 12 to 6PM. Telephone: 212-410-6120

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Lance Esplund, Maddie Phinney and Barry Schwabsky join David Cohen to discuss exhibitions by Polly Apfelbaum at Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden and D’Amelio Gallery, Stan Douglas at David Zwirner, Douglas Florian at Bravinlee Programs, Ron Gorchov at Cheim & Read, Eve Sonneman at Nohra Haime Gallery, and Yang Fudong at Marian Goodman Gallery.

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November 14, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Ana Finel Honigman, Joe Fyfe, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review Lothar Baumgarten at Marian Goodman, Sue Coe at Gallerie St. Etienne, Ron Gorchov at Nicholas Robinson, and Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum.

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June 25 to November 20, 2006
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46 Avenue, Queens, 718-784-2084

Ron Gorchov can lay claim to a rare achievement: He has created a distinctive form without becoming formulaic. Eleven of the 27 works in his show on the top floor of P.S.1 are painted on a similarly shaped, immediately recognizable idiosyncratic support, and within a close-knit family of motifs. The remainder are smaller canvases painted with vertical stripes.  Yet far from coming across as repetitive, the show is charged and sprightly.

“Double Trouble” brings together works from the 1970s and from the last five years in Mr. Gorchov’s trademark idiom: oil paint on linen, crudely stapled to a curved wooden stretcher. Organised by P.S.1’s founder and director, Alanna Heiss, the show is something of a homecoming for Mr. Gorchov: He was included in the museum’s inaugural 1976 exhibition, “Rooms,” when Ms. Heiss brought her Institute of Art and Urban Resources to the disused Queens public school building that is now a MoMA affiliate. The artist also had a solo show there in 1979.

“Double Trouble” is a title that, like Mr. Gorchov’s work, operates from different angles. On one level, his work operates both on sculptural and painterly terms, rather like Elizabeth Murray’s expressively shaped supports. More specifically, the Gorchov shape, which has been compared variously to a saddle, a mask, and a shield, curves in such a way as to be both concave and convex, as it is bent twice, top to bottom and side to side, rather like the plywood seat of an Eames chair. And his pared-down vocabulary is very fond of forms in pairs — without his quite being a dualist. In this context, double trouble is an addiction that an aesthete is only too proud to admit to, like girl trouble.

Mr. Gorchov had been off the scene for a long time — the show leapfrogs the 1980s and ’90s — when was brought back to art-world attention last year with a show organized in a temporary downtown space by the young impresario Vito Schnabel. His main room at P.S.1, like the office space Mr. Schnabel found for him, has a rugged, no-nonsense feel — a soaring ceiling and a décor lacking in finesse  —that is theatrically appropriate to the heraldic, almost martial quality of the work. What with the armor-like shape of his canvases, you are put in mind of the great hall of a medieval castle.

Mr. Gorchov’s paint handling is robust but unfussy. His typical work places simple shapes of one color against a ground of another. These can be mirror image, geometric shapes, like the double pair of relatively neat yellow ovals against a sloppy, expressive green ground in the 9-foot-tall “5th One” (2006); or discrete, irregular shapes like the pair of contrastive green forms in “Palais Jamais (Who’s Afraid of Purple and Green)” (2005), which seem to slip toward the sloping edges of their support. Despite their distinctiveness, the shapes in “Palais Jamais” resist categorization as either organic or hieroglyphic.  In other works, like “Veronique” and “Mariana’s Room” (both 2006) amoeba-forms recalling Arp have a fluid sense of evolving growth.

Other motifs have figural connations. “Amphora” (1975) resembles a pair of bowed legs. “Ausonian” (2006) suggests footprints, and “Hazard” (2005) hints at handprints.

Sometimes the shapes have a hard, slow, sculptural sense, like the flint or menhir-like pair in “Rejiv” (2005), where nervous, drawn pentimenti increase the sense of forms carved out of the pictorial ground. Other times, as in “Gigue” (2000) there is a gestural sensibility — forms whose calligraphic speed suggest fluency and immediacy.

These contrasts of form language, speed, and depictive phenomena keep the show lively, diverse, and energized. Far from being specific to one mood or message, Mr. Gorchov’s idiom turns out to have the flexibility of a sonnet, conveying a whole range of emotions and values.

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Ron Gorchov at Vito Schnabel until June 25
250 Hudson Street, between Broome and Dominic, 212 627 7011

Perhaps it is his name that sets it off, but Sean Scully’s show of new paintings at Lelong inspires an alliteration of adjectives: sumptuous and satisfying (his most to date), the work is strong, sensual, cerebral, simple, subtle. Something in his pared-down formal vocabulary warrants such dumb language play: the hallmark of his style is a kind of mute lyricism. Think of him as a tabla player, extracting unexpected reserves of melody and variety from a percussive instrument.

There is something very remarkable in an artist who develops a form without becoming formulaic. Mr. Scully pairs and arranges rectangles of contrasting and closely hued color in vertical and horizontal patterns to form organic grids. His paintings are a kind of Rubik’s Cube, only the aim is the opposite of resolution. He has been pursuing this idiom for years yet, however trademarked the Scully look has become, there is always a sense of fresh discovery in each work. Mr. Scully’s form is a vehicle, not a destination: Patterns, together with color, gesture, and application, are always at the service of painterly emotion.

Since eschewing the somewhat theatrical devices he favored earlier in his career — such as placing one canvas within another or juxtaposing supports of varying size — Mr. Scully has become more aware of the intrinsic value of composition as something within the painting process. He can be credited with saving the grid from Minimalism, for however simplified and single-minded his approach appears to be, his art is anti-serial.

This partly has to do with the built-in ambiguity of his basic unit: Thicker than the brushstrokes from which it is made, the Scully lozenge is too wide to be a stripe, but it doesn’t settle down to being a self-contained field, either. Each shape is invested with a restrained muscularity that gives it internal tension, then is set with subtle, deliberate misregistration that allows glimpses of ground behind, setting the forms alight. Despite their obstinate abstractness, his lozenges tease perception: Two arranged horizontally struggle to avoid connotations of sea and sky; vertically, they inevitably seem figural.

The largest new painting, at 9-feet-by-12, is “Raphael” (2004). Compared with the quilt-like compositions that flank it at Lelong, it is a busy, complex picture. Resolutely asymmetrical, it keeps the eye guessing with shifts of scale, temperature, tempo. Mr. Scully’s rectangles are generally double-square, doubled or tripled to form sets that are then arranged in relation to other sets. The top of the bottom horizontal line serves as a kind of horizon, grounding the composition.

This bottom line is made up, from the left, of a triple horizontal stack of black sandwiched by fleshtoned pink; a vertical pair in gray and lighter pink; a horizontal pair in black and blue; and a vertical triple, this time in a grays, darker flanked by lighter. The penultimate pair, the black and blue, occupy an entirely separate pictorial register, and lead the eye into a deep space with its implied marine nocturne, making the viewer more aware of the decorative flatness of the other shape relationships. Pictorially, it is a cat among the pigeons, tensing the relations between the various sets, sending the eye into ricochet.

Sean Scully’s flaglike arrangements sometimes flirt with heraldry, but Ron Gorchov’s outlandish creations sail off into the sunset with it. His sculptural, walk-through paintings arouse Medieval fantasies, as do the vaguely menacing, totemic, shieldlike supports, with their improvised, brutal-naïve decorative patterns, that loom from the walls.

Mr. Gorchov’s exhibition, his first in over a decade, offers an overview of his work since the 1970s, when he evolved his distinctive style. He enjoyed initial success with Abstract Expressionist-derived work in the late 1950s but dropped out of the scene with the advent of Pop Art, feeling his work to be “retarded” in comparison. For many years he taught at Hunter College, where his mentor was Tony Smith. This show is being presented in a temporary, downtown space — a showroom that’s raw and tall, like the work — by teenage impresario Vito Schnabel, son of painter Julian, an old friend of Mr. Gorchov’s.
With these scraps of biography, it is tempting to view the work as a kind of bridge between the existential Minimalism of Smith and the gutsy, operatic, neo-expressionist bravado of Mr. Schnabel. The comparison is actually not so glib: This work grows out of the pared-down language of high Modernism to forge something personal and emotionally resonant. The quest also bears comparison with Mr. Scully’s: Both men work from basic blocks,and though Mr. Gorchov’s solution is more theatrical than Mr. Scully’s, both are sophisticatedly simple and subtly strong.

“Entrance” (1972), with an upper element reconstructed in 2005, is 15 feet high and, at its top, almost 20 feet wide. Constructed out of curved saddle-like supports painted on its convex front in bright solid colors, it has flanking walls of equal height, one made of four such forms, the other six shorter ones. This creates an entrance you can walk through and supports two mammoth planks in blue and gold. Behind, you are free to view the neat, solid, strident carpentry. The experience combines fairground, stage-set, Stonehenge, and all the theory you have ever read about support and surface, illusion and reality.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 2, 2005

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