Drawings: Graphite on Paper, 1960s through 2000s
ISBN: 978-1-955260-70-1
Front Cover: Sonia Gechtoff, Untitled - SG-2002-GP-873, 2022, Graphite on paper, 30 x 41.5”
Title Page: Detail: Sonia Gechtoff, Untitled - SG-2002-GP-873, 2022, Graphite on paper, 30 x 41.5”
Sonia Gechtoff Drawings: Graphite on Paper, 1960s through 2000s online presentation at David Richard Gallery November 16 - December 23, 2022
Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9E, New York, NY 10001 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705 | 505-983-9555
DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery
Gallery Staff: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers
All rights reserved by David Richard Gallery, LLC. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in whole or part in digital or printed form of any kind whatsoever without the express written permission of David Richard Gallery, LLC.
Artwork: © 1964 - 2008 - Sonia Gechtoff
Catalogue: © 2022 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Artwork © Sonia Gechtoff Images by Yao Zu Lu
DAVID RICHARD GALLERY
Drawings: Graphite on Paper, 1960s through 2000s
SONIA GECHTOFF The Drawings
Drawing was a major part of Sonia Gechtoff’s studio practice throughout her seven-decade career, whether on paper or over acrylic paint, either on paper or canvas. John Yau practically credits Gechtoff with inventing this novel way of modeling the surfaces of her acrylic paintings by using pencil and graphite1. This practice began in the mid-1960s with drawing on paper overpainted with acrylic medium and pigment, as opposed to using tinted papers, and became a major part of each series and most paintings through the 1970s and continued throughout the remainder of her career.
Gechtoff’s drawings on paper were conceived as stand-alone artworks in and of themselves, not a sketch or study for a painting. Each drawing was intended to be a unique work of art, often as part of a series of 3 to 5 works, sometimes more, as she worked through permutations to resolve an aesthetic concept or specific imagery.
The meticulous detail and precision of Gechtoff’s individual, intentional strokes with the pencil produced modeled shapes and forms of the same subject matter found in her paintings. In many of her drawings, especially those from the 1950s and 60s, the strokes of graphite were every bit as powerful and bold as her legendary forceful wielding of the palette knife to lay down large swaths of oil paint on the surface of heroic scaled canvases. The forceful and long metered strokes of graphite in her drawings produced compositions full of strong contrasts of light and dark passages that evoked depth, motion, and energy across the paper support that rivaled any painting.
Gechtoff’s drawings often paralleled major series of paintings that were frequently also in process as she used both mediums to explore a series of subjects simultaneously, such as: gardens, architectural structures, rippling streamers, waves of water, turbulent winds, bird’s wings, billowing smoke, flames, and celestial bodies. Collectively, the drawings were a major percentage of Gechtoff’s artistic output each decade and an in-depth collection of her artworks would not be complete without drawings on paper.
1 Yau, John, “A Forgotten Painter and Her Visionary Abstraction, Hyperallergic”, October 12, 2019. https://hyperallergic.com/521757/a-forgotten-paint er-and-her-visionary-abstraction/?utm_source=DRG+-+General+List&utm_campaign=ccdab8535c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_13_01_00&utm_medium=e mail&utm_term=0_f35bfd4da9-ccdab8535c-43551183
David Eichholtz November 2022 New YorkThe circular structure in the center first appeared in the early 1960s and Gechtoff referred to it as an “Icon”. The influence for this structure came from her Russian heritage and exposure to religious icons throughout most of her life. The interior of the Icons changed over the years. Initially, in the 1960s they were swirls of pencil marks or paint strokes, then evolved into something primordial with blocky and curvilinear forms that appeared to be ready to hatch. Later, they became smooth and emulated celestial bodies. In the 1990s, the Icon dominated several series of drawings that spanned garden settings, moonscapes, and astral views, all full of these smooth orbs.
The wide blocky, T-shape that resembles an old rotary dial phone from the late 1950s and 60s, was referred to as a “Flag” or “Flag Icon” by Gechtoff. The flags generally had a circular Icon in the center, but often appeared as just the blocky T-shaped structure. In the mid-tolate 1960s they began to morph into a cross structure and thus, became anthropomorphic. The circles worked their way to the top of the cross and resembled heads. Additional circles appeared across the T-Shape or ends of the horizonal structure.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-1966-GP-243-1966 , 1966 Graphite on paper 22 x 14.75”
Bi-partite structures became a frequent compositional structure for Gechtoff. More important is the use of graphite to model gestural marks and abstract shapes emulating gestural brush strokes on canvas.
Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-1966-GP-231, 1966 Graphite on paper
The spherical Icon is the predominant shape in this drawing. The modeling of the interior gestural passages with graphite in a range of values suggests spatial depth and reads like permutations of the spherical shape in the foreground with the darker one receding into the background.
Untitled - SG-1985-GB-514 , 1985 Graphite on board 14 x 11”
This drawing is representative of many compositions in graphite during the 1980s. Columns and arching shapes became prevalent along with gestural passages suggesting vegetation and gardens.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-1993-GP-742 , 1993 Graphite on paper
A good example of an Icon that looks more like a sphere functioning as a moon in a garden setting. The bottom of the drawing contains columns and arching structures, possibly from a pergola. Above the pergola, the gestural movement suggests vines and vegetation. The geo metric shape on the far right side suggests a building.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-1993-GP-740 , 1993 Graphite on paper
The shape of streamers appeared during Gechtoff’s series of garden paintings that followed her two paintings that paid homage to Utagawa Hiroshige, the Japanese artist known for his traditional landscape paintings. Perhaps the streamers were inspired by vines or fabric hang ing from a garden structure from above in other paintings or garden setting that Gechtoff frequented.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-1996-GP-737 , 1996 Graphite on paper
Gechtoff loved the arches in Japanese gardens and they appeared in many of her drawings and paintings. The marks and curved gestural forms represent vegetation above and below the arch in the center.
Gechtoff created several small suites of drawings referencing bird’s wings: Dark Wings, Double Edges, Night Wings as well as individual paintings attributed specifically to Doves and Swans. This drawing, Flight, also comes out of the artist’s fascination with birds, the elegant shape of their wings and effortless motion in flight.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-1998-GP-718 , 1998 Graphite on paper
An example of multiple celestial bodies surrounded by a swirl of cloud-like shapes echoing the central circular form. Drawings such as these refer to and continue series from the 1980s that were derived largely from memory and dreams. Hence, conflating strong abstraction with representational elements.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-2002-GP-873 , 2002 Graphite on paper 30 x 41.5”
An abstract drawing that demonstrates Gechtoff’s immense skill and control of graphite. Visible are her deliberate, elegant long pencil strokes, perfectly spaced with value progressions of light and dark that model the paper surface with gestures suggesting depth and volume with possibly vegetative forms moving in and out of the picture plane. This structure is representative of similar structures found in other drawings and paintings of garden settings.
Sonia Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-2004-GP-863 , 2004
Graphite on paper 41.50 x 30.25”
This tripartite drawing contains motifs similar to the ones used in a few of the series of abstract drawings of bird’s wings. Very strong pencil strokes yielding dark, nearly black passag es alongside passages of much lighter values. The strong contrast in light and dark shapes is dynamic and suggests a great deal of depth and shadows between the sinuous forms.
Gechtoff
Untitled - SG-2008-GP-871 , 2008 Graphite on paper 36.25 x 29.25”
These large curvilinear forms also appear in a series of late paintings from the same period, all inspired by: the movement of the water; shapes and permutations of clouds in the sky; and the vegetation around the Hudson River in New York. Another force of nature that inspired Gechtoff and held her in awe.
Sonia Gechtoff, an important Abstract Expressionist painter was born and raised in Philadelphia. After graduating in 1950 from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she moved to San Fran cisco in 1951 where she was greatly influenced by the painting of Clyfford Still. She taught at the California School of Fine Art working alongside Hassel Smith and Elmer Bischoff and associated with other Bay Area Abstract Expressionist painters such as Madeleine Diamond, Lilly Fenichel, Deborah Remington, Jay DeFeo and James Kelly, who she married.
The move to San Francisco was productive and garnered her much national attention when in 1954 she was included in the exhibition, “Younger American Painters” and her work was presented alongside Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gechtoff had the first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957. She was included in the US Pavillion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair as well as the “Annual” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. San Francisco had a tremendous positive impact on Gechtoff, she was very much involved in the unique cultural scene and felt the local support. It is where she had her greatest achievements, such as developing her bold use of the palette knife to create long, sharp strokes of pigment across the canvas and the corresponding early recognition with solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (currently SFMoMA) and the De Young Museum.
Gechtoff moved to New York in 1958 and worked there until she passed away in early 2018. Though she exhibited at prominent New York galleries, including Poindexter Gallery and Gruenebaum Gallery, significant critical recognition was more difficult to achieve. She felt that the San Francisco art community was more open and treated women artists with greater equality than she experienced in New York. However, never stopping and always moving forward, Gechtoff painted and exhibited throughout her entire career and taught at the National Academy Museum and School in New York, New York University and Art Institute of Chicago. Compositionally and aesthetically, her work changed over the decades in New York. Given her interests in figuration, architecture, landscape and earth elements, representational elements became more prevalent in her paintings and drawings, while abstraction and gestural brush strokes remained constant. She switched from oil to acrylic paint and traded the palette knife for graphite to maintain strong, sharp defining strokes and boundaries in her work.
Gechtoff’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Achenbach Foundation, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Academy of Design, New York; Oakland Museum of Art, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Museum of Art, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; and Worcester Museum of Art, Massachusetts, among others. Most recently, her paintings were included in the very important exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Museum of Art in 2016 that subsequently traveled to the Mint Museum and the Palm Springs Museum of Art in 2017.