Charles Hinman, an artist known for his three-dimensional shaped canvases that transcended the tradtional concepts of painting and sculpture, died on May 29 in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was 93.

Charles Hinman

(1932 – 2026)

View Down, Across to the Left and Right, 1964 

Oil on shaped canvas  

96 x 84 x 12 inches

Signed and dated verso

Exhibited:

Richard Feigen Gallery, New York, NY, 1964

Provenance:

Purchased from the above exhibition

by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Meriden, CT;

by descent to Private Collection, San Francisco, CA;

D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., New York City, NY

Charles Hinman, an artist known for his three-dimensional shaped canvases that transcended the tradtional concepts of painting and sculpture, died on May 29 in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was 93. Hinman was born in Syracuse, New York on December 29, 1932. He attended art classes at Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now Everson Museum of Art) and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 1955.  He was a professional baseball pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves while pursuing his BFA. From 1955 to 1956 he studied at the Art Students League, then served in the United States Army from 1956 to 1958.  Hinman lived in New York City and held various part-time jobs while he continued to paint. He taught painting and engineering drawing at Staten Island Academy, New York from 1960 to 1962, and was the shop instructor at Woodmere Academy on Long Island from 1962 to 1964.  In these two positions, he developed carpentry and engineering skills that gave him the ability to construct his own shaped canvases with complex three-dimensional curves.  In 1963, while seeking an independent path, he created his first shaped canvases in his studio on the Bowery, where Robert Indiana and Will Insley (who was also working on shaped canvases) had studios as well.

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. Other artists in the exhibition incuded 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. 

Usually Hinman began his work by building charcoal drawings of volumetric shapes. Out of the series of drawings, he would select one drawing and turn it into “shop drawings” to determine how the organic shape could be turned into a constructed form, with intricate shape stretchers supporting it. While building the armature, he addressed the level of three-dimensionality of the work. Once the work had been stretched with canvas and given a ground, he then determined colors, 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 Museum of Modern Art, New York. He said he was then using color as if he were painting a hot rod.

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 and having a separate stretcher underneath it. With a more muted palette of grays, silvers, and tans, the artist attained subtle interactions of color shapes interlocking with each other in space within a rhythmic order. 

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 the 1964 show, the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Nelson Rockerfeller purchased works. 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. More solo and group exhibitions followed with Feigen through 1969 and then Hinman signed on with the Paris dealer Denise Rene, having solo exhibitions at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1971 and then in her New York gallery in 1972, 1973 and 1975.

Hinman visited Japan, Thailand, India, Iran, Greece, Italy, France and England. He served as artist-in-Residence, Aspen, Colorado in 1966. Hinman taught at Cornell University and at Syracuse University. He also held teaching positions at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, the Cooper Union, Princeton University, University of Georgia campuses in Athens, Georgia and Cortona, Italy, and other distinguished institutions. In 1989, Hinman’s work traveled to Russia for an exhibition organized by Donald Kuspit titled “Painting Beyond the Death of Painting” at the Kuznetsky Most Exhibition Hall in Moscow. Hinman credited Russian Supremacists as having a strong influence on his work.  

In 2013, the Marc Straus Gallery in New York organized a retrospective covering the six decades of his career. 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 “The Shaped Canvas,” places Hinman among the fathers of the shaped canvas movement, alongside artists such as Lucio Fontana, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Tom Wesselmann.

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, CA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Nagaoke Museum in Japan; the Louisiana Museum in Denmark; the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel; and the Pfalzgalerie Museum in Germany, among others.

“My consuming interest in making these paintings is to establish the real sculptural space of the work in context with an illusory space and show how these spaces interact. I think of my paintings as occupying a 6-dimensional space: the three dimensions of space, one each of time, light, and color.”

– Charles Hinman