we're in Artbridge's storage looking at a newly acquired work by R.C.
Gorman.
It's an abstraction.
It's so vibrant.
It's explosive, it's bright, it's neon, it's electric.
It feels like it's humming.
It's just buzzing with light.
And we're mostly familiar with R.C.
Gorman for his pared down scenes of stoic Navajo women, often working, often weaving.
We really associate him with his figural work.
So seeing this explosion of formal experimentation in this massive scale is so exciting.
RC Gorman occupies a really interesting and important place in art history.
To go into a gallery in the Southwest was to see his numerous lithographs.
He was commercially very successful.
And I think often because of that, people don't spend a lot of time taking seriously what he's doing on the canvas.
But even those prints that he's so well known for are explorations that come out of his experience in Mexico, looking at some of the great muralists there.
And I think in that figural work you both see, as you're saying, the emphasis of the Mexican muralists in the modeling of the bodies, in the social realist convention, but also you see the emphasis of a matrilineally organized society.
R.C.
Gorman was Navajo.
And I think what's so exciting about this work is he's pulling from Navajo weaving motifs.
And so, even while he's no longer painting a woman sitting at her loom, he's still honoring women's labor.
That is what this piece is about to me.
And I think we could interpret it that way.
So it's so interesting to take something that is historically textile and then to transform it and to look very closely at those patterns, but on a large scale canvas.
And I think RC Gorman while also being so commercially successful, while playing the market just so brilliantly, is pushing the convention of what we expect.
This feels really experimental.
It looks like he's challenging himself.
You have this really thin wash, these colors that seem to migrate in and out of each other and create a kind of incredible depth.
And then I'm really taken with this gray blue and the way that it is not a solid but seems to have almost flaked off, seems to have a kind of age, a kind of ancientness associated with it, which I find incredibly compelling.
And when his figural work is known for this unparalleled gloss, this smoothness, here you see this absolute explosion of experimentation.
The colors are wispy.
They look like they're on fire.
They're dripping.
They're running.
They're moving.
There's an almost impressionistic quality about the brushwork happening here.
The layering is so complex.
At first glance, it seems as if this band across the surface is clearly in front.
And yet there are areas where either it's transparent so we can see through it to the warm colors behind, or those warm colors are somehow migrating and creating an even more complex layering.
And the more I look at it, the more I have absolutely no idea how this was made.
Every square inch of the canvas, something different is happening.
And there are areas that almost look as if they're tie-dyed.
There's, as you call them, sort of wisps or almost flames, these kind of vertical soft feathery forms that seem to drip down and almost create a kind of landscape.
Often when R.C.
Gorman was asked about his inclination towards painting women, he suggested his affinity with the feminine.
He was very close to the matriarchal figures in his family as a child.
That was a through line in terms of how he moved through the world.
And I think here you have a really beautiful formal exploration of what that means.
And that's because the forms are coming from textiles that would have been woven by women.
It's a celebration of women's labor, of women's design genius, of women's formal expertise, of Indigenous abstraction that was pioneered by women.
So this painting is coming at a moment when the American art scene is reconsidering and reevaluating the role that textiles have played in abstraction.
You have a 1971 show at the Whitney about quilts and then you have a 1972 show touring Navajo textiles that were borrowed from the collections of Frank Stella Donald Judd, Kenneth Noland.
These were some of the hottest artists in the market at that moment and you can see the affinity for the abstraction that exists in textiles historically and their work, even though they were seen as cutting edge contemporary artists.
And that show and this painting, in conversation with it, are offering a historiographic corrective.
They're saying that all of this abstraction in New York City.
This isn't cutting edge.
These men didn't invent it.
This tradition was pioneered by these artists, like the ones that Gorman is referencing in this piece, these Dine weavers.
Gorman is doing some reclaiming.
He's bringing this back to Santa Fe.
He's showing not just that these abstract painters are pulling from these textiles as source material, but that these textiles have always been the pioneers of American abstraction.
