Charles Hinman

Charles Hinman

Painter

Charles Hinman visited CCA and in conversational style, revealed his 2D and shaped 3D canvases from the 60’s to present. We learned that his pieces have been collected by the Met and the Whitney Museums, in addition to across the U.S., Europe and Japan. His biggest influence is in Minimalist art after a time of Abstract Expressionism, DeKooning and Pollock, and was partnered with Frank Stella’s paintings, constructions and sculpture in the exhibition, & Shape and Structure”

An American pioneer of hard-edged shaped canvases, Charles Hinman has had a distinguished career and inexorable commitment to a single idea. Hinman has been painting hard-edged shaped abstract canvases for over half a century. His active involvement as a painter parallels Frank Stella during the mid 1960’s, when both artists became involved in changing the format of a painting from a mainstay rectilinear surface to other improbable shapes. In some ways, Hinman’s early painting from 1964 became a touchstone for artists who gradually began to focus their attention on the shaped canvases. The genre, in which both he and Stella were major practitioners, evolved during a strategic period in the story of contemporary abstract painting, a period that refuted the authority of the gesture in favor of geometric space. As new variations on this theme began to arrive on the scene, works by Leon Polk Smith, Ellsworth Kelly and Ron Gorchov, among others, received critical attention.