A solo exhibition by Ukrainian-American artist Sonia Gechtoff (1926-2018), one of the leading figures of American abstract expressionism, is on display at the New York space of the Olney Gleason Art Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition is open until December 20th.
This was reported by the Olney Gleason Art Gallery.
The project, titled “The Land of the Mind. Painting 1982-1987,” focuses on a brief but defining period in the artist’s career, when she achieved a new fusion of technique and imagery. The exhibition highlights the unique combination of acrylic and graphite that has become emblematic of her authorial language, as well as themes of nature, architecture, and urban landscape.
The project’s title comes from a review by Hilton Kramer in The New York Times (1982), where he described Gechtoff’s paintings as “poetically imagined and technically flawless,” noting, “The real locale in these pictures is the land of the mind…”.
Born in San Francisco, Sonia Gechtoff has lived and worked in New York since 1958. Her mother, a Ukrainian-born artist, instilled in her a deep respect for form, color, and inner expression. Over the course of a 70-year career, Gechtoff has repeatedly changed her style—from expressive palette-brush compositions to elegant geometry, from oil to acrylic, from hard gesture to delicate graphite drawing over paint.
In the 1980s and 1990s, motifs of the sea, rocks, industrial horizons, sky, and smoke became dominant in her work.
“I wanted to be able to combine drawing and painting… It was an incredible experience for me,” the artist herself recalled.
Interest in her legacy is growing rapidly. Gechtoff’s work is featured in a major tour of Abstract Expressionists: The Women, organized by the American Federation of Arts, which will run until 2027. It has also been included in key exhibitions on women expressionists, Action, Gesture, Paint (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2023) and Women of Abstract Expressionism (Denver Art Museum, 2016).
“Gechtoff achieved a powerful, independent vision… It is time to take a closer look at what this remarkable artist has accomplished,” notes art historian John Yau.
The exhibition is open to visitors until December 20 at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY.
Background
Sonia Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia in 1926 and died in New York in 2018. She graduated from Pennsylvania Academy of Arts before moving to San Francisco in 1951, where she established herself among the Beats Generation. She gained national recognition for her inclusion in Younger American Painters at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1954, alongside Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and others. She staged a solo museum exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 1957.
She participated in the inaugural exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, where she later staged solo exhibitions, as well as in the American pavilions of the Brussels World’s Fair (1958) and the VI Biennial de São Paulo (1961). She received a Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.
Her work resides in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO and The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, among other museums.
Photo: Olney Gleason
Author: Inna Mikhno