Ron Gorchov
American, 1930–2020
Gorchov worked with curved surface paintings and shaped canvases. He moved from Chicago to New York City in 1953, after having attended the University of Mississippi, Oxford; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He had his first solo show at The Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in 1960 and he has subsequently exhibited at other institutions in New York City, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Queens Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and MoMA PS1.
“From the beginning, I conceived Totem to respond to what I see as the goal of FAPE — to use contemporary art to create settings that support chiefs who are striving to promote world concord. Serving this purpose involved a complex process that the individuals I worked with at FAPE understood with unusual sensitivity. Their enthusiastic support and openness to a living process and our shared concern with quality in all the details allowed me to realize the original conception — to project variable, painted color in space with a patently visible and static support.”
