Richard Gorman – Colourist Press Release

“A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.”

Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke

The Christopher Cutts Gallery is excited to present “Richard Gorman, Colourist,” celebrating the Canadian painter, and his mastery of colour. The show will feature large-format pieces from the 1970s and 1980s, along with his celebrated Orpheus series and later Beta series, created in the 1990s and 2000s.

In the early years of his career, Gorman emerged with both bold abstracts and pensive landscapes, characterized by thick impasto and dramatic strokes of colour. He would move from a broad palette of over 40 pigments to extremely limited selections of colour, at one point rejecting, and then eventually returning to, black. The 1970s and 1980s large-format abstract paintings in this exhibition, spanning 10 feet in length, are sublime experiences of colour and paint, almost overwhelming in scale and energy.

The Orpheus series, title inspired by poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, sees Gorman’s colourful riverside landscapes of the 1980s distilled to a single tree on a horizon line. Using a squeegee, Gorman swiped paint across his canvases to produce these wind-swept trees in fields of colour. The early Orpheus paintings were made with contrasting colours, and the solitary tree would appear whole or fragmented, almost figure-like at times. Gorman later turned to analogous colours, so close in hue that the surface of the canvas was left with just a ghost of the iconic tree.

Gorman explored colour theory throughout his career, and he would reference Josef Albers’ thoughts on the relativity of colour —the idea that the way the eye perceives colour is not absolute, but rather dependent on surrounding colours, lighting, and context. The Beta series from the 2000s is a culmination of these explorations, featuring bursts of vibrant colours against contrasting backgrounds. He called the visual effect generated by the clash of these colours on the canvas “colour jumps.” The pigments appear to bleed into one another, seeming to vibrate and leap back and forth over the edges where they meet. The technique gives the minimal paintings a buzzing quality.

“Richard Gorman, Colourist” is the gallery’s first major Gorman exhibition since the artist’s death in 2010. It will emphasize his play with colour and his work’s ability to evoke such powerful experiences, visual and emotional, in viewers.

Join us in celebrating Gorman’s career at the opening reception tonight, from 5 to 8 pm. This exhibition will run from October 9 – November 1, 2025.

“Richard was a prince of a fellow. He was well-liked — loved — by everyone. He had this energy, and everyone thought they were his best friend. He was very serious about his art practice. He was dedicated. When you went to his place, you’d see these colour swatches littered all over his studio, experiments with colour in his Albers-ian way.

He was able to imbue his life-force into his work. You still feel that when you’re in the presence of his work. His character really comes across in his paintings, sophisticated, elegant, and kind.”

– Christopher Cutts

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
In Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke presents art as a transcendental experience, and the artist’s spirit as more than mortal. Nature would yield to Orpheus’s songs, and animals, stones, and trees would follow the sound of his lyre. His art connected the heavens and earth. Gorman’s favourite part was the hero’s mourning following his descent to the underworld to bring his lost love, Eurydice, back to life, and his infamous failure to do so, a mistake born from the same love that got them that far.

“She, so belov’d that from a single lyre
more mourning rose than from all women-mourners, –
that a whole world of mourning rose, wherin
all things were once more present: wood and vale
and road and hamlet, field and stream and beast, –
and that around this world of mourning turned,
even as around the other earth, a sun
and a whole silent heaven full of stars,
a heaven of mourning with disfigured stars: –
she, so beloved.”

Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke
(Trans. Stephen Mitchell).