Tropics

Sonia Gechtoff

The work of Abstract Expressionist printmaker Sonia Gechtoff borrows from eight decades of exposure to art, artists, genres and mediums in a household that was always full of artists. Her father was the Ukrainian Abstract Expressionist painter Leonid Gechtoff, who began training Sonia to paint at age six, and her mother was noted Bay Area gallerist Ethel Gechtoff (East & West Gallery). Her work was greatly influenced by Bay Area Modernism and she was given her first solo show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco at age twenty-two, kickstarting a successful California exhibiting career. After her move to New York with her husband, painter James Kelly, in 1958, she continued to find success - though always with limited exposure, as was not unusual for women on the East Coast in mid-century America.

Despite this, she continued to produce paintings and prints, and became known especially for her work using the palette knife to produce thick, explosive lines across the canvas, a technique that would influence such painters as Jay DeFeo. By the late 1970s Gechtoff had embraced a hard-edge style that deconstructed the profusion of her earlier compositions yet still remained bright and bold.

In “Tropics” she fills the angular shapes of a minimalist tropical scene with textured color, allowing the rigid shapes to exude movement. Unlike her early gestural abstract expressionism Sonia Gechtoff uses a hard edged abstracted composition for this large color etching, with added embossing. The shapes are like angular flattened tropical palm leaves, like a collage, with a simplified landscape background.

Gechtoff used the whole sheet of paper for the image, signing it using a white crayon. This is one of two images, the other being "Brooklyn Bridge" that were done at Hudson River Editions and published by Gruenebaum Graphics Ltd., New York in 1984.