Top 10 Pioneers of The Shaped Canvas - Artland Magazine

Top 10 Pioneers of the shaped canvas - Artland Magazine 14/9/21 18:08
Articles and Features
Shapeshifters.
Top 10 Pioneers of the
shaped canvas
Elizabeth Murray, Things to Come (detail), 1988. Fisher Collection.

SFMOMA.
From the “cut-out” paintings of László Peri
https://magazine.artland.com/top-10-pioneers-of-the-shaped-canvas/ Página 1 de 20
to the saddle-like canvas of Ron Gorchov,

explore a selection of contemporary artists
who shaped the canvas, ultimately
revolutionizing painting in its very essence
by adding a three-dimensional quality to
their creations.
1. László Peri
László Peri, In Front of the Table, 1922, tempera on

board. Image courtesy MoMA.
Born at the end of the nineteenth century,

Peter László Peri, was a Hungarian artist
and sculptor who many believe was the
original innovator of the shaped canvas. He

moved to Vienna, and then to Berlin in
1921, at which time he simplified his name
and created his first geometric abstract
reliefs. His contributions to the
constructivism of this time were challenges
both to the commonly understood
physical characteristics of a painting and
to the surface of the wall on which they
hung. He produced irregularly shaped wall
reliefs, polychromatic “cut-out” paintings
which opened up new planes and
made the hard contour of the elements a
key visual device of his compositions.
2. Frank Stella
Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965. Metallic powder

in polymer emulsion paint on canvas. Image courtesy

MoMA.
Frank Stella is an American painter,

sculptor and printmaker noted for his work
in the areas of minimalism and post-
painterly abstraction, but it is for his work
at the beginning of the 1960s that
catapulted him to international
acclaim. Upon moving to New York City
in the later 1950s he reacted against the
expressive use of paint by most painters of
the abstract expressionist movement,
instead finding himself drawn towards the
“flatter” surfaces of Barnett Newman’s
work, and the target paintings by Jasper
Johns. Around this time he said that a
picture was “a flat surface with paint on it –
nothing more”. From 1960 Stella began to
produce paintings in aluminium and
copper paint which were his first works
using shaped canvases, often being in L, N,
U or T-shapes. These emphasized the
picture-as-object and later developed into
more elaborate shaped canvas designs,

including the Notched-V series of
1964, Irregular Polygons of 1967, Protractor
Variation paintings of 1968 onwards and
the Polish Villages series beginning in 1971.
3. Lee Bontecou
Lee Bontecou, Untitled 1966, Welded steel, canvas,

epoxy, leather, and wire. Image courtesy Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago.
Lee Bontecou is an American sculptor and

printmaker and widely considered a
pioneer from the New York art world of the
1960s. She achieved considerable
critical acclaim and commercial
success early in her career, exhibiting at

Leo Castelli’s gallery alongside
other generational luminaries Jasper
Johns, Frank Stella and
Robert Rauschenberg. She is best known
for the works she created in 1959 and the
1960s, which challenged artistic
conventions of the time by being neither
specifically paintings nor sculptures, and
by their unusual materiality. Wall hung, they
consist of welded steel frames covered
with recycled canvas and industrial
materials (such as conveyor belts or mail
sacks) and other found objects. Her best
constructions are at once mechanistic and
organic. Art critic Arthur Danto described
them best, suggesting they were “lying at
the intersection of magnified insects, battle
masks, and armored chariots…”
4. Richard Smith
Richard Smith, Piano, 1963, PVA paint on canvas.

Image courtesy Tate.
Richard Smith was a British artist who was

one of the most original painters of his
generation, and one of the most
underrated during his lengthy career. He
was a truly transatlantic figure who
enjoyed huge commercial and critical
success in the US and Britain during the
1960s and 70s. Early on, his art bridged the
apparent gap between abstraction and pop
art, the sophistication of his paintings
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revealing the inadequacy of such

categorisations. Studying at the Royal
College in the mid-1950s his generation
was the first to be fundamentally affected

by the first extensive displays in Britain of
American abstract expressionist
painting. For many artists painting was
founded on highbrow spiritual and cultural
values and, for others, on such formal ideas
as the importance of the flatness of the
canvas. In stark contrast, Smith was keen
to stress his interest in popular culture,
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Titles such as Revlon and Panatella hinted

at his source inspirations, creating shaped
canvases that extended his paintings into
the space of the room to such a degree
that they almost became sculptures. Privacidad
5. Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Piece, 1966 © 2021 Ellsworth

Kelly. Image courtesy MoMA.
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter,

sculptor, and printmaker associated
primarily with a type of hard-edge
minimalism that came to prominence in the
1960s. His works were created with
deceptive simplicity, focussing their
emphasis on line, color and form. In the
1950s he became interested in the work of
Ad Rheinhardt, an important artist of
the preceding generation whose work Kelly
thought his own related closely to. In 1949
he made his first abstract canvases,

experimenting throughout the 1950s with
reductive and elemental forms in solid
colors. During the 1960s he started
working with irregularly angled
canvases. Yellow Piece (1966), was the
artist’s first shaped canvas and represents
Kelly’s pivotal break with the rectangular
support and his redefinition of painting’s
figure/ground relationship. With its curved
corners and single, all-encompassing color,
the canvas itself becomes the composition,
transforming the wall behind it into the
picture’s ground. In the 1970s he added
curved shapes to his repertoire, and Green
White of 1968 marks the debut appearance
of the triangle in Kelly’s oeuvre, a shape
that recurs throughout his career; the
painting is composed of two distinct,
shaped monochromatic canvases, which
are installed on top of each other: a large-
scale, inverted, green trapezoid is
positioned vertically above a smaller white
triangle, forming a new type of geometric
composition.
6. Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann, Smoker, 1 (Mouth, 12), 1967 © Tom

Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image
courtesy MoMA.
Tom Wesselmann was an American artist
who was a prominent member of the Pop

art generation, and who often formed the
figurative imagery of his work from a
shaped canvas. Even though he
incorporated the slick imagery of
advertising, billboards and consumer
culture Wesselmann never liked his
inclusion under the American pop art
label, pointing out how he made
an aesthetic use of everyday objects and
not a criticism of them as consumer
objects: “I dislike labels in general and ‘Pop’
in particular, especially because it
overemphasizes the material used. There
does seem to be a tendency to use similar
materials and images, but the different
ways they are used denies any kind of
group intention”. In 1962 Wesselmann had
begun working on a new series of still life
works, experimenting with assemblage as
well as collage. In Still Life #28 he even
included a television set that was turned
on. The first shaped canvas nudes were
made in 1964.
7. Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam, Carousel State, 1968 © Sam Gilliam.

Image courtesy The Met.
Sam Gilliam is an abstract artist, who since

the 1960s has practiced a unique form of
lyrical abstraction and color field painting,
freed from the constraints of the stretched
canvas. Whilst some may consider it a
stretch to consider his work an employer of
shaped canvases, it is nonetheless the
case that he has pioneered a unique form
of unstretched canvas cloth as shape. He
works on stretched, draped and wrapped
canvas, and adds sculptural 3D elements.
He is recognized as the first artist to

introduce the idea of a draped, painted
canvas hanging without stretcher bars
around 1965, considered a
major development of and even departure
from the Color Field School.
8. Carmen Herrera
Carmen Herrera, Amarillo “Dos”, 1971. Maria Graciela

and Luis Alfonso Oberto Collection © Carmen
Herrera, Image courtesy Whitney Museum of
American Art.
A Cuban-American born in 1915, Herrera’s

career is a sensational story of discovery,
garnering international recognition only
relatively recently by which time she was
already in her 80s. She worked in obscurity

for decades despite groundbreaking work
in abstraction many years ahead of the
mainstream establishment. Beginning in
the 1950s during the pomp of the Abstract
Expressionist period, she began to
formulate a distinctive and pared-down
geometric language. Herrera was educated
in Havana and in Paris, where she studied
art, art history and architecture. Experts
often cite the influence of architecture
studies in her geometric-shaped canvases
and expertly executed angles. During the
1950s she began to conceptualise her
paintings as objects, experimenting, in her
words, with “the physical structure of the
painting … paintings becoming an object.”
9. Ron Gorchov
Carmen Herrera, Amarillo “Dos”, 1971. Maria Graciela

and Luis Alfonso Oberto Collection © Carmen
Herrera, Image courtesy Whitney Museum of
American Art.
Ron Gorchov is an American painter who

has developed a singular artistic practice
bridging sculpture and painting. Gorchov
became a strong artistic force in the late
1960s and early 70s within a group of
Manhattan-based abstract artists, such as
Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Blinky Palermo
and Ellsworth Kelly, who rejected the
ubiquitous rectangular canvas in favour of
new shapes and configurations. Gorchov’s
key innovation, developed in the late 1960s

and the one that garnered significant
critical attention, was to make his paintings
on a complicated wooden support that was
at once convex and concave, a shape that
has been compared by critics to a saddle
or shield form. Of his work, he said “I
realized that when you stretch a saddle
shape on a frame it had properties that
were unusual: the whole thing got stronger.
And it could make less acute corners. I also
discovered that the new structure creates
an even tension throughout the whole
surface. What I’ve finally learned was the
right way to build it was to start with a
rectangle, and the curved part has to
spring off of it. Therefore, the structure
itself becomes an argument to the
rectangle, and that interested me.” On
these grounds, he most often paints one or
two biomorphic elements set against
a coloured ground of thinly applied paint.
At once highly formal and lyrically
expressive, to this day these shaped
canvas supports are the only structure he

utilises in his work.
10. Elizabeth Murray
Elizabeth Murray, The Sun and the Moon, 2005-6. Oil

on panel, mounted on wood. Image Courtesy Phillips
Collection.
Elizabeth Murray was an American painter

best known for her large-scale, elaborately
shaped canvas works and for re-shaping
modernist abstract forms into a riotous,
cartoon-based language. Bordering on the
sculptural, many of Murray’s paintings

incorporate multiple curvilinear shapes,
bold primary colours and elements that jut
out from the wall. They disregard
traditional pictorial illusionism and also
many of the formal concerns previously
explored by proponents of the shaped
canvas. Murray moved to New York in 1967,
and in 1971 was included in the Whitney
Museum of American Art’s annual survey
exhibition. Over the following decades, her
work took on an aesthetic most closely
aligned and inspired by her contemporary
Frank Stella, and was to subsequently
exert a strong influence on an influential
generation of artists that came to
prominence in the East Village in the 1980s
including Carroll Dunham and George
Condo.
Related links
Lost (and Found) Artist series: Carmen Herrera
Lost (and Found) Artist Series: Ron Gorchov
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Top 10 Pioneers of the shaped canvas - Artland Magazine 14/9/21 18:08

Articles and Features

Elizabeth Murray, Things to Come (detail), 1988. Fisher Collection.

From the “cut-out” paintings of László Peri

to the saddle-like canvas of Ron Gorchov,

László Peri, In Front of the Table, 1922, tempera on

Born at the end of the nineteenth century,

original innovator of the shaped canvas. He

Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965. Metallic powder

in polymer emulsion paint on canvas. Image courtesy

Frank Stella is an American painter,

more elaborate shaped canvas designs,

Lee Bontecou, Untitled 1966, Welded steel, canvas,

Lee Bontecou is an American sculptor and

success early in her career, exhibiting at

Richard Smith, Piano, 1963, PVA paint on canvas.

Richard Smith was a British artist who was

revealing the inadequacy of such

was the first to be fundamentally aﬀected

Titles such as Revlon and Panatella hinted

Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Piece, 1966 © 2021 Ellsworth

Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter,

he made his first abstract canvases,

Tom Wesselmann, Smoker, 1 (Mouth, 12), 1967 © Tom

Tom Wesselmann was an American artist

who was a prominent member of the Pop

Sam Gilliam, Carousel State, 1968 © Sam Gilliam.

Sam Gilliam is an abstract artist, who since

He is recognized as the first artist to

Carmen Herrera, Amarillo “Dos”, 1971. Maria Graciela

A Cuban-American born in 1915, Herrera’s

already in her 80s. She worked in obscurity

Carmen Herrera, Amarillo “Dos”, 1971. Maria Graciela

Ron Gorchov is an American painter who

key innovation, developed in the late 1960s

canvas supports are the only structure he

10. Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray, The Sun and the Moon, 2005-6. Oil

Elizabeth Murray was an American painter

sculptural, many of Murray’s paintings

! Prev Next "

Product Company Partnership Support

Artworks for About Artland for Contact

© Artland ApS. All rights reserved. # $ % &

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