A recognised Bay Area Abstract Expressionist, Sonia Gechtoff is known for her incessant experimentation with painting materials, techniques, and compositions throughout her decades-long career.
Read MoreGechtoff was born in Philadelphia in 1926 into an artistic family: her father Leonid was a painter and her mother Ethel was a gallery owner and manager. Following her graduation from the Philadelphia Museum School of Art in 1950, Gechtoff moved to San Francisco in 1951, where she shifted from figuration-oriented work to Abstract Expressionism.
Gechtoff worked across different styles and materials, first adopting the palette knife as her primary tool for creating oil paintings, then experimenting with the paintbrush and graphite as she increasingly moved towards acrylic paint. Though identified as an Abstract Expressionist, Gechtoff never completely abandoned figuration, incorporating abstracted but recognisable imagery into her paintings.
In a thriving 1950s San Francisco art scene, Gechtoff gained recognition for her use of the palette knife and bold gestures that applied a thick impasto of paint onto the canvas. Gechtoff's work appeared in the group exhibition Younger American Painters: A Selection 1954 at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1954, and she was the first artist to have a solo presentation at The Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957. That same year, the artist held a solo show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
Gechtoff's early critical success in San Francisco, however, was curtailed with gender bias when she moved to New York in 1958. Despite increasing obscurity, Gechtoff continued to expand her practice, maintaining a sense of both the figure and abstraction as she explored new approaches to painting. Using acrylic paint, the artist played with dramatic colour schemes and visible brush strokes, while employing graphite and pencil to model areas of shadow.
A circular motif recurs throughout Gechtoff's paintings, often depicted as a coalescence of smaller fragments and colours. Graphite marks softly engulf shards of blue, white, orange, and green in Flag Icon (1962–3), a pastel and collage work on paper; orbs in shades of red and purple in the acrylic painting Celestial Red (1994) are encased within larger circles rendered in the same colours. Gechtoff oscillates between smooth, opaque surfaces and areas with visible brush strokes in her paintings, creating an image suggestive of dormant energy and tension.
Architectural elements also appear regularly in Gechtoff's work, typically as a gate-like structure with columns on either side in Paestum (1991). Rendered in black, the gate in Guardians of the Green (1991–2001) seems to open to a different universe, in which the brilliant green and white contrast with the darker green, red, and purple outside it.
Gechtoff has received renewed attention along with the work of other Abstract Expressionist women painters. Between 2016 and 2017, her paintings were part of the major exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism, which was organised by the Denver Art Museum and travelled to the Mint Museum and the Palm Springs Art Museum. In June 2022, a solo exhibition of Gechtoff's work was co-presented in New York by kaufmann repetto, Bortolami, and Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Sonia Gechtoff's work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: The 1960s In New York: A Series of Transitions, David Richard Gallery, New York (2021); Sonia Gechtoff: The Ferus Years, Nyehaus (2011).
Group exhibitions include: Focus On Abstract Gems: Small Paintings, Sculptures, and Paper Pieces, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York (2018); Women of Abstract Expressionism, Palm Springs Art Museum, California (2017); Mint Museum, North Carolina (2016); Denver Art Museum, Colorado (2016); Momentum: an experiment in the unexpected, San Jose Museum of Art, California (2014).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
