Whitehot Magazine: Jacqueline Gourevitch at Storage
By DAVID JAGER June 20, 2025
Jacqueline Gourevitch
Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York
At ninety-one, Gourevitch is among the last of the so-called New York School painters, the extraordinary group of artists who flourished from the forties through the early sixties. A motley crew of artists intent on reducing painting to its fundamental principles, she has continued on her own eclectic practice for over six decades. Her current show at Storage gallery, which runs through July 2nd, is a testament to this unique path. Though she has pursued a number of subjects throughout her long career, this show is dedicated to her most consistent subject from the seventies to the present, clouds.
Gourevitch began painting clouds in the early sixties. Hundreds of cloud paintings have followed. As luminous masses of vapor, long associated with dreaming and fantasizing, they nonetheless allow her to tread a delicate line between representation and abstraction in a way that is markedly rooted in the experience of seeing. Though they are devoid of narration, they are intensely engaged and dramatic on their surface. As she said in a recent interview, “To keep movement, to keep the surface of the painting alive, that is what’s most important to me.”
In Cloud Painting #60 (Homage to Mondrian’s red cloud), a flaming orange cloud floats boldly in the center of deep cerulean sky. It is unmistakable, in its cloud-ness, curled and crepuscular, feathered with slate and charcoal at the edges. Behind it, smaller clouds that lend it prominence and drama. Its visual impact is immediate and tremendously pleasing, yet something happens as you look at it. You see the brush strokes, hundreds of subtle touches, retouches, and adjustments, nearly calligraphic. You start to wonder, is this a representation of a cloud, or is it an abstraction? Or could it be, must it be, both?
The line between representation and abstraction comes and goes throughout Gourevitch’s painterly career, much as the ocean tide traces a line along the shore. But even at their most figurative, her cloud paintings never let you forget they are paintings. Their accuracy is further troubled by the fact that many of them are not directly painted from nature, but rather are amalgamations from several different viewings and studies. “What we are looking at, really, is an inventory of cloud possibilities” she once told Artforum.
The possibilities continuously toy with both nature and reality while keeping the formal aspects of painting alive. Cloud Diptych #79, for instance, the light has a sense of directionality in keeping with the daytime sky. There is a beautiful, rendered fluffiness to them that anyone with eyes on a cloudy day would recognize. Yet there are no concrete points of reference, no horizon or landmark to anchor the eye. The shading suggests realistic landscape painting. The framing suggests an abstract field.
In an era where painting is more determined by autobiography, identity and morbid self-reference, Gourevitch is a bracing return to painting as paining. Profound surface engagement, plumbing the line between representation and abstraction, and investigating both the act of looking and the proliferative imagination harkens back to an era when painters were committed to Platonic purity in art. Her work is notable as much for what it does not contain as for what it includes. One is reminded of Robert Motherwell, an early mentor of Gourevitch’s, who famously said his painting allowed “No nostalgia, no sentimentalism, no vulgarism, no propaganda, no autobiography, no violation of the canvas as a flat surface, no cliche’s, no obviousness, no mere taste…”
Gourevitch’s painting is guided by a similar ethics of exclusion. There is no referentiality, sentimentality, irony, mere taste, or narrative. She does bring an unmistakeable sense of natural light, rendered with surface tension, visual movement, dexterity and surprise. Taken as a whole, it is tantamount to drama. As one of last original students of the Black Mountain College, she brings with her the bracing preoccupations of a school helmed by Josef Albers, and who produced Ruth Assawa, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.
Gourevitch is a refreshing reminder that painting does not require contemporary sensationalism to be engaging. Even so, she is also an anomaly, even among the artists of her era. She shares Helen Frankenthaler’s reliance on nature as an inspiration, whose serene, poured abstractions are often infused with the spirit of land, lakes and sea. Her use of natural light as a theme also connects her tangentially to Agnes Martin, who also filtered the clear light of New Mexico into her contemplative geometric abstractions.
Beyond these faint similarities, however, any resemblance ends. Gourevtich is very stubbornly her own painter. Given that she is unclassifiable amongst other predecessors and peers (could she really be called a post painterly abstractionist?), Gourevitch is an interesting living anomaly, using the imaginative and evocative properties of clouds to mine the modalities, possibilities and ambiguities inherent in sight and in painting. She is the lone master of her own school of six decades, and the renewed scrutiny and admiration she is receiving is well deserved.