Photo © Cheryl Koralik
Murray Hochman is an artist who lives in Tyringham, Mass. Now in his early 80s, he has painted every day for the last 50 years. His body of work is immense and impressive, and his work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in New York and elsewhere since 1968. Although his formal degree is in ceramics, not painting, it is as a minimalist painter that he found his calling. While his early paintings were recognized by leading galleries and collectors, for the past two decades Hochman has kept himself at some distance from the art establishment, letting his own processes, both internal and external, and his materials shape his work. I’m completely a New Yorker, born on Delancey Street, and lived in Soho most of my life. But my wife was a dancer and going to school in Hartford, so we lived there for a while before moving back to the city. At the time I was working on geometric drawings. One day I went to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (in Hartford). I was in the Renaissance room, sitting on a marble bench, absorbing everything around me. A guy comes in and sits down at the other end of the bench, and begins talking. Turns out he was Sam Wagstaff, the curator of the show, an exhibition featuring the work of David Smith. Smith was an American abstract expressionist sculptor and painter who was a big influence on me. Wagstaff was very important in the art world. He was encouraging to me in lots of ways, and kind of got me going and introduced me to people in the art scene in New York.
I really had no inkling of what I was doing. But I started exhibiting right away, and sold a piece to the Pace Gallery. In my new series of paintings I’ve started using acrylic. In the past, all my work was done using lacquer, which is very toxic, and I wanted to get away from the toxicity. It’s also a new idea for me to use a letter as the starting point of a painting. It has kind of a literary tension and a content. Certain letters mean more to me. I like the letter Z, because is there really a last letter? But the process always comes back to the same thing — resolving the subjective and the objective. A month-long show of Hochman's latest series, "X Factor," opens at the Morrison Gallery in Kent, Conn. at 25 N. Main Street on Saturday, June 4 from 5-7 p.m. His work is also currently on view at the Diana Felber Gallery in West Stockbridge, Mass.
