Sonia Gechtoff

(American, 1926–2018)

Sonia Gechtoff was an American artist known for her Abstract Expressionist paintings. Wielding a palette knife, Gechtoff produced energetic works with vortex-like marks of nuanced color. “I wasn’t the least bit interested in feminist art, and I still am not,” she once said. “We were feminist before the feminists came along.” Born on September 25, 1926 in Philadelphia, PA, she was taught to paint from a young age by her father the artist Leonid Gechtoff. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and moved to San Francisco in 1951. In California, she fell into the milieu of Bay Area artists such as Elmer Bischoff, Jay DeFeo, and her future husband James Kelly. The artist cited the work of Clyfford Still as a major influence, especially during her shift from expressive figuration to abstraction. Gechtoff and her husband moved to New York in 1958, and quickly became fixtures of the city’s art scene. Over the course of her career, Gechtoff’s work fell out of fashion but continued to evolve, incorporating motifs from her everyday surroundings and abstracting them in unique ways. The artist died on February 1, 2018 in New York, NY at the age of 91. Today, her works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.