Jacqueline Gourevitch
Biography
Jacqueline Gourevitch (b. 1933, France) moved to the United States in 1940, and now lives and works in Lower Manhattan. She studied at Black Mountain College with Stamos and Clement Greenberg and began exhibiting in the mid-1950s while at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gourevitch was included in the 1973 Whitney Biennial and in 1975 showed at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut as part of their Matrix series. In 2015, Helen Molesworth included her work in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Gourevitch’s paintings inhabit the precise edge between representation and abstraction. As such, they embrace investigations of light and pictorial space. Gourevitch began her ongoing series of “Cloud Paintings” in the 1960s. Her ethereal, close-cropped clouds evoke various genres of painting— from abstraction and Fauvist landscapes to Abstract Expressionism— without straying from her singular vision. A keen understanding of the light and color of the sky distinguishes her work from what might initially appear to be color field compositions rendered in neutral tones. Works from Gourevitch’s series, “City Paintings”, were made while looking down from high windows during a residency at the original World Trade Center in 2000. More recently, she has incorporated views from new buildings at #4 and #7 in the reconstructed World Trade Center complex. Work from “Terrain/In Flight” paintings are sometimes based on graphite drawings and notes made while flying and looking down at the earth’s surface.
Gourevitch has also exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, among others. Her works are included in the collections of The Jewish Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Menil Collection, Houston; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut, among others.
