Entitled Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943–47, an extensive exhibit of works by Arshile Gorky is in New York. The exhibition continues through 23 December 2017.
Holland Carter has an interesting note about this period of Gorky’s work:
Then within a few years, the forms thin down, grow lighter. A 1946 drawing titled “Virginia-Summer” is an allover web of scraps: like a centerless scatter of stems, clods and hard-shell insects turned up by a rake. (This allover tactic influenced Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, for some of whom Gorky was a mentor.) Elsewhere, the view tends upward. A succulent green pastel drawing called “Apple Orchard” suggests buds and leaves on a branch, maybe one of the trees in his father’s Armenian orchard, in sudden, miraculous bloom.
Gorky’s works conjure a narrative of symbols. We sense the painter’s presence, but more as a mind than as a physical presence. Surrealism’s automatism is the language of the psyche. In surreal abstract work, we can sense a purgative desire to intuitively paint visual diaries. In the work of Arshile Gorky, forms seem to involve individual obsessions.
Gorky’s work is included in Abstract Painting: Concepts and Techniques.