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Charles Hinman is an an Abstract Minimalist painter who pioneered the concept of the three-dimensional shaped canvas in the mid-1960s. Since then, he has continued to explore the ambiguity between the illusion of perspective in painting and the physical space of sculpture, creating characteristic canvases that play with the perception of volume, color and light.

Early years
Charles Hinman was born in 1932 in Syracuse New York. He initiated his artistic education at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, now the Everson Museum of Art, where he attended classes. He went on to complete his BFA in 1955 at Syracuse University. Alongside his artistic talent, Charles Hinman was also dedicated to sports. While studying at university he was a professional baseball player for the Milwaukee Braves in the minor league. He moved to New York to study at the Arts Student League before serving two years in the army. Upon his return he was a mechanical drawing teacher at the Staten Island Academy from 1960 to 1962 and a carpentry shop instructor at the Woodmere Academy on Long Island. Thanks to his education and professional experience Charles Hinman developed the necessary artistic and technical skills for him to imagine and to build the complex wooden structures that are at the heart of his three-dimensional canvases.

Always at the heart of the New-York art scene
From the moment Charles Hinman moved to New York up until today, he has always lived and worked in the hotbed of artistic creation. In the early 1960s he lived on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan where he shared an abandoned sail-making loft with James Rosenquist. It was an ideal art studio offering large open spaces to work at an affordable rent. Along with Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Agnes Martin who resided in the neighbouring buildings, they formed a small artistic community away from the Upper-East side and the Abstract Expressionists from whom they wished to differentiate themselves. They did not constitute an art movement as such, but rather a “support and critique family that helped each other go on their individual paths." Throughout the 1960s they produced works that prefigured Pop, Minimal and Feminist Art . In 1965, Charles Hinman and Robert Indiana left Coenties Slip for the Bowery where they shared a building at 2 Spring Street . In 1971, he moved a block away to Bowery Street where he settled in an 8000sq/ft studio where he has remained ever since. Once again, this location was at the heart of the New York art scene: below Hinman’s studio was that of Tom Wesselmann and above worked Will Insley, across the street were the studios of Adolf Gotlieb and Roy Lichtenstein . In 2002, the New Museum became his neighbor when it was built on the adjacent lot.

A pioneer of the Shaped Canvas
In the 1960s Charles Hinman played an important role towards redefining the physical shape of paintings. The shaped canvas was born from the desire to break away from the traditional square or rectangular frame of painting. Rather than a formalized medium or window that contained the subject, the contours of the painting became part of the subject itself. In the mid-1960s several abstract minimalist painters were experimenting with its possibilities, the most famous of which is Frank Stella. Charles Hinman drove the concept one step further by pushing the canvas out from the wall; his works were a form of hybrid between paintings and sculptures. This type of painting is what is known as a three-dimensional shaped canvas. As early as 1963-64 Charles Hinman created sculptural paintings with protruding geometric and undulating forms. While Sven Lukin and Richard Smith were also toying with the concept of the three-dimensional canvas around the same time, Charles Hinman’s defining particularity was his focus on the illusion of space and subtly suggested volume, embracing the use of color, shadow and reflection. He was influenced by Ellsworth Kelly in his flat and contrasting Hard-edge use of color but with the objective of generating and accentuating a perception of volume. In the subsequent years until the early 1970s, Hinman examined the possibilities offered by this new medium: strongly protruding canvases, geometric and sensual profiles, color contrasts, color reflections on the adjacent wall, shadows, monochrome canvases… This primal period announced the various paths and series he would later develop throughout his six-decade long career.

Early recognition:
Thanks to his place in the art scene and his innovative ideas around the shaped canvas, he quickly received widespread recognition. It was through James Rosenquist, that Charles Hinman caught the attention of prominent New York gallery owners and museum directors who visited the studio they shared. Two exhibitions in 1964-65 introduced Hinman’s work to the grand public and to critical attention; “Seven New Artists” at the Sidney Janis Gallery and a solo exhibition at the Richard Feigen Gallery. In 1965 Frank Stella and Henry Geldzahler included Hinman’s work in their group show “Shape and Structure” at Tibor de Naguy, alongside Donald Judd, Larry Bell, Sol Lewitt, Carl Andre and Will Insley. His work was shown at the Whitney Museum‘s landmark show “Young America 1965” and the following year in “United States 1670-1966”. Hinman was represented by Richard Feigen who showed his work at his New York and Chicago galleries. While major museums such as the MOMA, the Whitney Museum and the Albright–Knox Gallery soon bought his work for their permanent collections, his paintings also found a home in the collection of Nelson Rockefeller. From 1971 to 1973 the Parisian gallerist Denise René showed his work at her Paris and New York galleries.(Wigmore)

A complex process
Throughout his career, Charles Hinman has developed a methodical process by which he creates his works. He first draws many sketches of the final shape he wishes to create. He then designs a very minute blueprint of the frameworks he needs to construct to achieve this shape, comprising all the angles and lengths of the frame. His works are often composed of a juxtaposition of shaped canvases, which he bolts together into an integral form. He adds the third dimension to his paintings by fixing protuberant forms to the underpinnings. These shapes push the canvas out from the wall and create the volume in his paintings. He then paints various planes of his work in order to create volume and to play with the eye of the viewer. He sometimes paints the reverse side of the canvas which sits off the wall, so as to produce a halo effect around his work. The use of light and shadows as well as contrasting colors and reflections play an important role in his creations.

6 dimensions
Hinman's work focuses on the perception of volume as opposed to literal space. He uses an array of techniques to create volume in the eye of the viewer. It is a form of trompe l'oeil that constantly evolves depending on the spectator's vantage point. “My concept of my work is dynamic---never static. I think of my paintings as occupying a 6-dimensionnal space(…) the three dimensions of space and one each of time, light and color.” Space and time imply movement and the change of light. “As light moves across the object, the forms and the color appear to change with the rearrangement of the shadows. (…)The brightness causes a surface to move forward—the darkness causes the surface to recede. Further, the choice of adjacent colors causes a sensation of motion of the surfaces”

Series
Over Hinman’s 6 decade-long career, he has continuously created works in series. His early works from the mid-1960s are voluptuous and organic with strongly contrasting hard-edge colors and projecting forms. He then moved to a two-dimensional, minimalist and geometric style in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s he was exploring the potential of arched “double curved” profiles to shape his canvases. These structures became increasingly complex throughout the 1980s, reaching for scale and color in leaf-like arrangements. Since 2000, he has returned to a pure and minimal style working with light as much as with color. “A single facet or canvas may have its own color, or the shadow across it may serve as color (…) Sometimes the color solely belongs to the edge of a work, or so it seems, until one notices that Hinman has painted the back (…) He is not just shaping an object, but also taking it out from the wall.”

The Shaped Canvas revisited
In 1964, the Guggenheim Museum organised the show "The Shaped Canvas". Laurence Olloway, the curator of the exhibition decided to focus on two-dimensional Minimal works only, de facto excluding three dimensional as well as Pop art works from this movement. This initial selection has been questioned and broadened over the years by several retrospective group shows that hosted a wider variety of shaped canvases. Frank Stella's 1965 group show "Shape and Structure" immediately refuted Olloway's position by including Charles Hinman's paintings. In 1979, The Visual Arts Museum in New York organised a show named “Shaped Paintings”. It opened the scope of the shaped canvas to Pop Art works as well as to three-dimensional shaped canvases. Charles Hinman's work was presented alongside that of Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Bernard Venet and Tom Wesselmann. In 2014, Charles Hinman was included in the group show "Shaped Canvas Revisited" at the Luxembourg and Dayan Gallery in New York. This exhibition, which celebrated the fifty years of the original Guggenheim show, places Hinman among the fathers of the shaped canvas movement alongside artists such as Lucio Fontana, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Tom Wesselmann.

Hinman today
In recent years, Charles Hinman’s work has garnered increasing attention both for his contemporary as for his “modern” (historic) works. According to some critics, his latest series of “Gems” and “Black Paintings” are arguably amongst his finest works. In 2013, the Marc Straus Gallery in New York organized a retrospective covering the six decades of his career.

Solo Show selection
2013 Charles Hinman - 6 Decades. MARC STRAUS, New York 2011 GEMS at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH, USA 2004 Boca Raton Museum of Art 1980 Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, USA