Charles Hinman, known for his three-dimensional shaped canvases, died on May 29 in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was 93. The news was first reported by the New York Times.
Born in 1932 in Syracuse, New York, Hinman received a BFA from Syracuse University before moving to New York to study at the Art Students League. By the early 1960s, he was living on Coenties Slip, in Lower Manhattan, which had become home to a cast of artists—among them James Rosenquist, Agnes Martin, and Ellsworth Kelly—who were producing works that anticipated Pop, Feminist, and Minimal art.
There, and in later studios on the Bowery, Hinman developed his own take on the shaped canvas—a concept also being explored by artists such as Frank Stella and Will Insley—building wooden armatures that added a third dimension to his paintings. By 1964, the year of his career-making solo exhibition at Richard Feigen Gallery in New York, he was creating wood and painted canvas constructions that ranged between the geometries of a work like 1964’s View Down, Across to the Left and Right (1964) to the compound and complex curves of such pieces as Poltergeist of the same year.
In later years, Hinman continued to expand on the possibilities of his chosen medium, producing an all-white series in the 1970s, works combining curvilinear and geometric forms in the 1980s, and his faceted “Black Paintings” and “Gems” in the 2000s. His works are held in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Denver Art Museum, the Nagaoka Museum in Japan, and the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, among other institutions.
