CHARLES HINMAN (b. 1932)
Available Work | Biography
Biography • Charles Hinman (b. 1932)
Charles Hinman was born and raised in Syracuse, New York, where he attended art classes at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now the Everson Museum of Art). In 1954, while pursuing his BFA at Syracuse University, Hinman was a professional baseball pitcher with the Milwaukee Braves minor leagues. Hinman received his BFA in 1955 and went on to study at the Art Students League of New York for a year before serving in the army from 1956 to 1958. Hinman taught mechanical drawing at the Staten Island Academy (1960-1962) and was the shop instructor at the Woodmere Academy on Long Island (1962-1964). In these two positions, Hinman developed carpentry and engineering skills that gave him the ability to construct his own shaped canvases with complex three-dimensional curves. Hinman worked at Coenties Slip from 1960 to 1962 in a studio shared with James Rosenquist whom he had met when they were students at the Art Students League. Seeking an independent path in 1963, Hinman created his first shaped canvases in his studio on 95th Street. In 1965, Hinman moved into a larger studio on the Bowery, where Will Insley, who was also working in shaped canvases, and Robert Indiana had studios as well.
Charles Hinman first received critical attention in the exhibition 7 New Artists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in May 1964 where he exhibited flat canvases cut at angles and suspended by cords. The other artists in the exhibition were: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Norman Ives, Robert Slutsky, Robert Whitman, and Arakawa. Hinman went on to add the third dimension to his shaped canvases while examining the subtle boundary between the picture plane and the space in front of it, as well as playing with the idea of literal versus illusionistic depth. Frank Stella and Henry Geldzahler included Hinman in their exhibition, Shape and Structure, at Tibor de Nagy in January 1965. The exhibition also included Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Will Insley, Neil Williams, and Larry Bell. In the exhibition, Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Structure at Finch College Museum of Art in May 1966, structures by Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson and shaped canvases by Hinman, Will Insley, and Sven Lukin were shown. Three Young Americans at the Oberlin College Art Museum in 1965 featured Hinman, Larry Poons, and Neil Williams. The Whitney Museum of American Art included Hinman in Young America 1965 and the following year in Art of the United States 1670-1966, as well as the 1966 annual. Hinman exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual in 1966 and 1969. In Painting: Out from the Wall at the Des Moines Art Center in February-March 1968, Hinman exhibited alongside Insley, Lukin, George Ortman, and David Novros.
Hinman’s first solo exhibition was at the Feigen Gallery in New York in Nov.-Dec. 1964, quickly followed by exhibitions with Feigen in 1965 at both his New York and Chicago galleries. Out of this 1964 show, the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Nelson Rockefeller purchased works. In the summer of 1965, Hinman was artist-in-residence at the Aspen Institute, where he produced about fifteen small paintings, including Orange Sunspot. In 1965, Hinman was one of four Americans invited to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Nagaoka, Japan where Hinman shared first prize with the Japanese artist Jiro Takamatsu. This was followed by a solo exhibition at the Tokyo Gallery in October 1966. Hinman’s Sunspot series of parabolic geometric curves were exhibited in his third solo exhibition at the Feigen Gallery in January-February 1966. Hinman had another solo exhibition with Feigen in 1967 and participated in group exhibitions at the gallery until 1969. He then signed on with the Paris dealer Denise René, having solo exhibitions at Galerie Denise René in Paris in Jan.-Feb. 1971 and thereafter in her New York gallery in Mar.-Apr. 1972, Oct. 1973, and Feb.-Mar. 1975.
Hinman was an instructor at the New York City program of Cornell University in 1967-1968, followed by teaching positions at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, the Cooper Union, the University of Georgia, Princeton University, and other distinguished institutions. He is now an instructor at the Art Students League of New York.
Hinman’s work examined three-dimensionality, exploring a fusion of the real space of sculpture and the illusory space of painting in his shaped canvases. As he told Corinne Robbins in the catalogue for his 1980 solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, his aim is to create “two separate entities that play against each other, to make the piece work with real and illusionary space, thus combining two separate realms that come together and play with one another.” [p.14, Hinman, Everson Museum of Art, 1980] He is drawn to forms which are buoyant, soaring, and free of gravity, leading his shapes to appear wing-like or cantilevered.
Hinman begins his works by building up charcoal drawings of volumetric shapes. Out of a series of drawings, he will select one drawing to turn into “shop drawings” to determine how the organic shape in charcoal can turn into a constructed form with intricate shaped stretchers supporting it. While building the armature, he addresses the level of three-dimensionality of the work. Once the work has been stretched with canvas and given a ground, he determines the color, often creating more sketches and repainting areas several times.
In the 1960s, Hinman used bright colors in his work adding an almost Pop aesthetic to his canvases, such as Poltergeist, 1964, which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He said he was then using color as if he were painting a hot rod. [p.16, Hinman, Everson Museum of Art, 1980] When the Museum of Modern Art in New York included Poltergeist in its exhibition of recent acquisitions in 1965, The New York Times selected Hinman’s work out of 80 exhibited to reproduce in its review. In 1975, Hinman began an all-white series of paintings. Returning to color in the late 1970s, Hinman treated color as spatial indicators with each color representing a different canvas unit; each color has a separate stretcher underneath it. With a more muted palette of grays, silvers, and tans, the artist built subtle interactions of color shapes interlocking with each other in space within a rhythmic order.
Hinman’s recent work was the subject of a traveling exhibition in 1980-1981, organized by the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, continuing to the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Texas (now the Austin Museum of Art – Laguna Gloria) and to the Fort Lauderdale Museum in Florida. Hinman’s work traveled to Russia in 1989 for an exhibition organized by Donald Kuspit titled Painting Beyond the Death of Painting at the Kuznetsky Most Exhibition Hall in Moscow. Hinman has always credited the Russian Supematists as having a strong influence on his work. Having held the Lamar Dodd Distinguished Professorship of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, and Cortona, Italy, from 1991-1994, Hinman was given an exhibition at the Georgia State Museum of Art at the University in Athens in 1994. There was an accompanying catalogue titled Charles Hinman: The Chimera Series, Works from Georgia. A solo exhibition of Hinman’s recent work titled Gems was held at the Butler Institute of Art in Youngstown, Ohio in 2011.
Museum collections with Charles Hinman’s work include: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Nagaoka Museum in Japan, the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, and the Pfalzgalerie Museum in Germany, among others. In 2012 Charles Hinman received a Guggenheim Fellowship.