USA, important work by Arshile Gorky, great abstract expressionist, discovered

A painting by Arshile Gorky (Vostanik Manoug Adoian; Khorko, 1904 - Sherman, 1948) hitherto unknown to critics has been discovered: the work, titled Untitled (Virginia Summer), was unearthed during a search for the publication of the catalog raisonné of the great Armenian-born American exponent of abstract expressionism. The painting will be unveiled Nov. 16 by the Hauser & Wirth gallery at its New York location.

The work, discovered in 2020, lay beneath another painting, The Limit, attached to the same frame used by Gorky when he left his studio in 1947. Hidden for more than 70 years, Untitled (Virginia Summer) is a rich and vibrant painting that will be featured in the Beyond The Limit exhibition, during which both Untitled (Virginia Summer) and The Limit will be shown to the public together for the first time, with works on paper also directly related to the newly discovered composition. The exhibition and accompanying publication are intended to provide new insight into the development of Gorky’s practice during the last years of his life, when his abstract images and style reached maturity.

A leading figure inabstract expressionism, a movement that transformed 20th-century American art, Gorky experienced a particularly explosive phase of creativity in the 1940s, when he began experimenting with new techniques. By mixing oil with turpentine, he was able to paint more fluid lines, achieving greater freedom of expression and increasingly gritty compositions. His breakthroughs are highlighted in the seminal work The Limit, in which dense surfaces of pigment dissolve into transparent veils of color, turning into backgrounds that converge and disappear into one another. The vivid forms in this painting, which was executed on a preparatory drawing, have no boundaries; instead, they are unlimited entities, bound together or floating in and out of an ambiguous spatial field.

Long hidden by The Limit, Untitled (Virginia Summer) combines movement and fluidity with intimate memories of vacations Gorky spent at Crooked Run Farm, the Virginia farm owned by his wife’s parents in the 1940s. In love with the Virginia countryside, Gorky produced dozens of en plein air drawings, capturing his responses to the dynamics of the natural world through automatic drawing and free association. The newly discovered work suggests biomorphic shapes and figures floating in and out of a vibrant landscape filled with green foliage enveloped by a sea of cloudy blue. The animalistic figures depicted here, with red and yellow eyes and multicolored body parts, are recurring motifs in Gorky’s work. Untitled (Virginia Summer) is an important example of Gorky’s great originality and ranks among the most interesting works of his career.

A great draughtsman that he was, Gorky often used works on paper as studies, shifting configurations and colors before further interpreting a composition on canvas. The drawings exhibited by Hauser & Wirth seemed to be the only large group of works on paper unrelated to a specific painting, until the recent discovery. Visitors to the exhibition will thus be able to see how the compositional study of the newly discovered work was directly determined by these drawings, and the forms replicated in shades of orange, red and brown. While Gorky’s creative process was never random, the resulting works are filled with a sense of immediacy, possibility and spontaneity. These latest gestural works combine Gorky’s characteristic mix of restraint and abandon, offering critical insight and scholarship to the artist’s practice. The exhibition is also accompanied by the first release of Gorky’s catalog raisonné and a film about the discovery of Untitled (Virginia Summer), made by Gorky’s award-winning niece Cosima Spender and Valerio Bonelli.

The first volume of the catalog raisonné, whose publication was initiated digitally by the Arshile Gorky Foundation in December 2006, is the result of more than five decades of research. The inaugural release of the catalog is not yet exhaustive, but it provides the most up-to-date, complete, and authoritative documentation of nearly two thousand known works created by Gorky between 1924, when the artist moved to New York, and 1948, the year of his death. The ongoing project will continue to be produced, published and maintained under the auspices of the Arshile Gorky Foundation. The Foundation’s intent in making the currently completed records available immediately is to provide the academic community and the art world at large with new and reliable research, accompanied, in almost all cases, by high-resolution images. By providing this information on a platform that allows the Foundation to make it freely available to anyone from anywhere, the hope is that Arshile Gorky’s work will reach a wider audience and inspire new research. The publication, designed by panOpticon with assistance from exhibition-E, is available at www.gorkycatalogue.org.

Pictured: Arshile Gorky, Untitled (Virginia Summer).

USA, important work by Arshile Gorky, great abstract expressionist, discovered

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