Cheim & Read

Cheim & Read is pleased to present Serge Poliakoff: Gouaches 1938–1969, an exhibition devoted to the works on paper of the Russian-born painter who lived and worked in Paris. This show follows the survey of Poliakoff’s work held at the gallery in 2016, which was the artist's first solo exhibition in New York in thirty-five years. Gouaches 1938–1969 opens on May 20 and runs through September 25, 2021. Serge Poliakoff (1900-1969) has long been considered a painter’s painter: Sean Scully has written an essay to accompany the current exhibition; Amy Sillman selected his Composition (1956) for The Shape of Shape, her acclaimed 2019 Artist’s Choice show at the Museum of Modern Art; Joe Fyfe curated the 2016 exhibition and wrote its catalogue essay. Poliakoff was part of the New School of Paris, a group of artists including Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, and Nicolas de Staël. “Poliakoff,” Fyfe noted, “was one of the ‘Nouvelle Ecole de Paris,’ a group of artists who came a generation after Picasso, Léger, Matisse, Miró, and Braque.” Like the Abstract Expressionists in the United States, he turned to pure abstraction exclusively in the postwar period, although works such as Bandes Colorées (1937) are evidence that he was already interested in it by the mid-1930s. In May 1936, in a letter to Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, he wrote, “Abstract art is finally taking off in quite a few countries.” Poliakoff, however, never adopted the oversize scale of his American counterparts, and continued to paint in a cramped studio even after he achieved recognition and financial success. The gouaches displayed in this exhibition, which are as small as 8 1/2 x 11 inches and no larger than 25 1/2 by 19 inches, underscore that sense of privacy. Their dazzling chromatic array departs from the loaded brushwork of the artist’s oil paintings with a freshness, intimacy, and personal touch that revels in the immediacy of pure, vibrant pigment. Writing about the gouaches in 1950, the French critic Pierre Gueguen stated: “Here is a serious mind, entirely dedicated to the dream of forms for form’s sake, which is the great mystery to be solved for Abstraction. He goes from the geometric purity of archetypes to the quivering of perceptions, held as they are like a tide entering a dike, canal or quay of a port.”

Cheim & Read is pleased to present a selection of works by Louise Fishman that span from 1979 to 2017. Image: Louise Fishman, To a Tree, 2004. Oil on linen. 49 x 33 in. Photo: Alex Yudzon. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

Cheim & Read is pleased to present Joel Mesler: The Rabbis, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper now on view at 23 East 67th. The exhibition runs through April 8th. In this new body of work, Mesler turns his focus onto a subject explored by artists as disparate as Rembrandt, Marc Chagall, and Max Weber. With their emotional immediacy and layers of latent meaning, these images depart from the deadpan humor of Mesler's earlier work and add an unexpected chapter in the artist's narrative of twists and surprises.

Cheim & Read is pleased to present Cumwizard69420: The Americans, at the gallery's Chelsea location, 547 West 25th Street, New York. The Americans is Cumwizard's first solo exhibition in New York. Cumwizard69420 describes himself on his personal website as a 'former economics and math student' who took his first and only art class, Intro to Drawing and Painting, before dropping out of college in 2019. After a stint as a food delivery driver, he started painting again in 2020 and has since created a remarkable body of boldly colored, fearlessly explicit paintings and watercolors. Drawing from the media multiverse of TV shows, movies, and the internet, Cumwizard casts a penetrating eye on the inflated egos and self-delusions raging through our celebrity-obsessed culture. And yet these images, which are often unnerving and frequently grotesque, are also generously human, laced with affection and humor. The name of the exhibition, The Americans, mirrors the title of the influential photography book by Robert Frank. The difference is that Frank shined a light on ordinary citizens, while Cumwizard's subjects are busy shining a light on themselves, creating a new kind of social landscape. Rather than appropriating such self-owns at face value, the artist transforms their imagery into the language of paint, layering them with personal themes and references to art history, the movies, and, as he told an interviewer on the website Insufficient Fare, 'things that make me laugh.'

Ron Gorchov Close Call,  2020 Oil on linen 29 x 23 1/2 x 7 inches 73.66 x 59.7 x 17.8 centimeters CR# RG.40348 Ron Gorchov Close Call, 2020 Oil on linen 29 x 23 1/2 x 7 inches 73.66 x 59.7 x 17.8 centimeters CR# RG.40348 PRESS RELEASE PUBLICATIONS VIDEOS RELATED CONTENT Cheim & Read is pleased to announce Ron Gorchov: The Last Paintings, 2017-2020, an exhibition of the works executed in the final four years of the artist’s life. It will be accompanied by a catalogue including a new essay by Barry Schwabsky. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Ron Gorchov passed away last year in Brooklyn on August 18, 2020, at the age of ninety. These paintings are the ultimate expression of his extraordinarily single-minded painterly vision. In the late 1960s, the artist invented a curved, saddle-like stretcher that creates a painting surface that is simultaneously convex and concave. The structure seems to “imbue the works with an altogether different energy, appearing as if to flex or spring away from the wall.” 1 While virtually all of the works contain the same basic elements, two abstract shapes that relate to one another within a colored field, “the distances the artist can travel within the self-imposed restrictions of his chosen format are wide and unpredictable.” 2 This structural invention is an important addition to the shaped paintings developed by a generation of postmodern artists during the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Elizabeth Murray and Ellsworth Kelly, among others. Cheim & Read inaugurated its Upper East Side venue at East 67th Street with Ron Gorchov: At the Cusp of the 80s, Paintings 1979–1983 in September 2018, which explored the artist’s expressive, lyrical works; this exhibition by contrast returns our focus to the core of the artist’s practice, which is more compositionally restrained. This exhibition is comprised of a group of intensely pigmented, vividly animated works that constitute Gorchov’s final testament. In his essay, “Lucky Painter,” Schwabsky reminds us that the shape of the painting’s support is not the only thing that individuates Gorchov’s art, and suggests that Gorchov’s acceptance of the accident lends the painting a mind of its own. “These passages are highly variegated, and serve as a record of the paint’s own adventures than the artist’s will.” In these dazzling works, we see the cumulative joy the act of painting brought Gorchov, and together, they demonstrate his lifelong dedication to his project. Looking at the canvases he completed in the last year of his life — Mocking Bird, Sir James Jeans, and July 4 — one is reminded of Titian, whose color and brushwork attained new heights of freedom while he, like Gorchov, was in his eighties.

Cheim & Read is pleased to announce Ron Gorchov: The Last Paintings, 2017-2020, an exhibition of the works executed in the final four years of the artist’s life. It will be accompanied by a catalogue including a new essay by Barry Schwabsky. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Ron Gorchov passed away last year in Brooklyn on August 18, 2020, at the age of ninety. These paintings are the ultimate expression of his extraordinarily single-minded painterly vision. In the late 1960s, the artist invented a curved, saddle-like stretcher that creates a painting surface that is simultaneously convex and concave. The structure seems to “imbue the works with an altogether different energy, appearing as if to flex or spring away from the wall.” 1 While virtually all of the works contain the same basic elements, two abstract shapes that relate to one another within a colored field, “the distances the artist can travel within the self-imposed restrictions of his chosen format are wide and unpredictable.” 2 This structural invention is an important addition to the shaped paintings developed by a generation of postmodern artists during the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Elizabeth Murray and Ellsworth Kelly, among others. Cheim & Read inaugurated its Upper East Side venue at East 67th Street with Ron Gorchov: At the Cusp of the 80s, Paintings 1979–1983 in September 2018, which explored the artist’s expressive, lyrical works; this exhibition by contrast returns our focus to the core of the artist’s practice, which is more compositionally restrained. This exhibition is comprised of a group of intensely pigmented, vividly animated works that constitute Gorchov’s final testament. In his essay, “Lucky Painter,” Schwabsky reminds us that the shape of the painting’s support is not the only thing that individuates Gorchov’s art, and suggests that Gorchov’s acceptance of the accident lends the painting a mind of its own. “These passages are highly variegated, and serve as a record of the paint’s own adventures than the artist’s will.” In these dazzling works, we see the cumulative joy the act of painting brought Gorchov, and together, they demonstrate his lifelong dedication to his project. Looking at the canvases he completed in the last year of his life — Mocking Bird, Sir James Jeans, and July 4 — one is reminded of Titian, whose color and brushwork attained new heights of freedom while he, like Gorchov, was in his eighties. A memorial to celebrate the artist’s life will be held on Monday, October 4th at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. The service will start at 6:00 PM. We kindly ask that you RSVP here. Ron Gorchov, born 1930 in Chicago, studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago before earning his B.F.A. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1951. Gorchov’s first solo exhibition was held in 1960 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and after a brief hiatus from the art world, he completed the first of his “saddle” paintings in 1967. The artist went on to pursue this signature curved painting structure in countless variations for the next fifty years. His work was selected for the 1975 and 1977 Whitney Biennials, and he went on to be included in multiple exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New Museum. Gorchov’s work has recently been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2014), the Centro Atlántico de Arte Modern, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2011), and MoMA PS1, New York (2006). Gorchov’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Cheim & Read, New York (2019, 2017, and 2012); Modern Art, London (2019); Maruani Mercier, Brussels (2019); Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2018); Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz (2016). His paintings are held by major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Cheim & Read is pleased to present Matthew Wong: Footprints in the Wind, Ink Drawings 2013–2017, an exhibition of ink drawings on rice paper. These works represent some of the late Canadian artist’s very first efforts in painting. The exhibition opens on May 5 and runs through September 11, 2021, and is presented in collaboration with the Matthew Wong Foundation. It will be on view at Cheim & Read’s ground floor exhibition space in Chelsea located at 547 West 25th Street. The 24 ink drawings displayed in Footprints in the Wind, Ink Drawings 2013–2017 possess the crisp graphic incision of woodcuts as well as the wildly imaginative expressionism that Will Heinrich described in his 2018 New York Times review as “psychedelic pointillism.” (1) Most of the imagery is based on nature and the landscape, while some are completely abstract (as in Where Did the Time Go?, 2016), and others are lyrically surreal (see Inside the Flower Cave, 2016, and The Performance, 2017). Wong lived and worked in Zhongshan, China, from 2013 through 2015, and moved back to Edmonton, Canada, in 2016. The influence of the legacy of Chinese landscape painting on these works is clear, and the young artist’s deployment of these traditional materials — ink wash on rice paper — seems to be a direct reference to ancient tradition. On trips to New York City, the artist visited Cheim & Read several times and met with John Cheim, who supported Wong’s earliest artistic efforts. Throughout these works, Wong’s celebration of light — as in the works like The Sun, 2016, and The Watcher, 2017 — never excludes a dark side. Hulking black shapes sometimes dominate the images, such as the mantis-like silhouette in an untitled drawing from 2015, or the jagged rocky outcropping in Landscape of the Longing, 2016. They are, however, surrounded by bright fields of grass or sky; centralized blazing orbs in the sky beat down on the landscape. Wong’s reconciliation of opposing forces in these works might suggest he was a pantheist in the vein of Mitchell and Van Gogh. Cheim comments on these works, “It is as if you can feel the particles in the air. The space between the interior and the exterior dissolves.” No painter in recent memory has blazed as brightly as Wong, who struggled with Tourette syndrome, Autism, and depression, and died by suicide in 2019 at the age of 35, only a handful of years after he made his first artwork. The freedom and complexity of his surfaces have led to comparisons to Édouard Vuillard, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Yayoi Kusama, and the early ink drawings of Louise Bourgeois. Writing in Hyperallergic in 2018, John Yau called him a “painterly cartographer [who] literally feels his way across the landscape, dot by dot, paint stroke by paint stroke.” (2) The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, along with a new commissioned essay by the art historian and theorist Dawn Chan, a New York-based writer and editor whose work appears in the The Atlantic, Artforum, Bookforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, The Paris Review, among other publications.

Cheim & Read presents Kimber Smith, Paintings: 1967 – 1980, the gallery’s first exhibition with the artist, and his first exhibition in the US since 2011. Kimber Smith (USA; born 1922 Boston, MA; died 1981 Southampton, NY) had his first exhibition at The New Gallery, New York, in 1951, where his work was paired with Joan Mitchell’s; the same gallery gave him his first solo only three years later. In 1954, Smith decamped to Paris where he lived and worked in an expatriate community of American painters who included Mitchell, Sam Francis, and Shirley Jaffe. A retrospective exhibition was held at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2004), which traveled to the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2004-2005). Smith’s effortless style anticipates the work of influential artists such as Mary Heilmann, Richard Aldrich, and Joe Bradley. For additional information, please contact Stephen Truax, stephen@cheimread.com.

In October 2019, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reopened its doors after a significant renovation that included a complete overhaul to the presentation of its permanent collection. In an attempt to recontextualize art-historically important works with recent and previously overlooked art, the museum transformed how their collection had been conceived. The museum also features artists who have not received their due attention with a particular focus on women artists. One such example is the juxtaposing of collection highlights, such as early Picasso works with Louise Bourgeois’s seminal personage, "Quarantania, I."   On Thursday, November 21, 2019, Cheim & Read will present In Honor of the New MoMA. This gathering of work will include artists currently on view at the museum, or whose work is significantly represented in the museum’s collection, and with whom the gallery has had a long association, including Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Ron Gorchov, Al Held, Jenny Holzer, Bill Jensen, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Serge Poliakoff and Sean Scully.