Richard Gorman
(1935–)
(–2010)
Richard Gorman
1935–2010
Richard Gorman (1935—2010) was a Canadian painter and printmaker. Gorman was known for his magnetic prints, which he created using ink-covered ball bearings manipulated with a magnet held behind the drawing board, and his large paintings in which he broadly handled paint.
Gorman grew up in Ottawa and was recognized early as a painter of promise by his teacher Jack Macdonald, when he moved to Toronto to attend the Ontario Collage of Art and Design, graduating in 1958. His first one-person exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto in 1959 brought attention to his work, and he was closely associated with the Isaacs Gallery artists until 1964.
Gorman worked in thick impasto and dramatic colors; his paintings have been described as “big attack” paintings. Action painting created an emotional expression that Gorman captured with gesture and bold color. His first abstractions evoked the landscape, but later in the 1980s returned to abstraction. Along with painting, Gorman also made aluminum sculptures, experimented with film, and is known for his magnetic prints that he created using a magnet, ink, and paper.
His work has been included in group exhibitions like Dennis Reid’s Toronto Painting 1953–1965, organized for the National Gallery in 1972, and more recently in the National Gallery’s Crisis of Abstraction: the 1950s, organized by Denise Leclerc in 1993. Gorman is in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Queen’s University, Department of Transport at the Edmonton Airport, Department of External Affairs, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
