Photo for EVG from 2016 by James Maher
Little had been made public about his death until a feature at The New York Times yesterday. His sister, Harriet Hirshorn, told the paper that the cause of death was coronary artery disease. He was 60.
Per the Times:
While other artists of his generation rode the art-market boom of the last three decades, he remained aloof, rarely putting his work up for sale at galleries. His spare website features a few of his paintings and photographs, but no contact information or personal details.His work was absolutely analog. Mr. Hirshorn made his own paints using traditional ingredients, and he scoured the Chelsea flea market for antique camera parts, the older and more obscure the better.His landscapes drew on a color palette of dirty greens and autumnal browns. They were Turner-esque in their near abstraction, with swirls of misty clouds obscuring craggy cliffs and stormy seas.His photographs likewise seemed to exist out of time. He made them by applying a solution of salt and silver to drawing paper, layering it with a negative and exposing it to light to capture an image — a technique developed in England in the mid-19th century that eventually fell out of favor because it required very long exposures that made it hard to keep an image in focus.
He arrived here in the late 1980s. During an interview with EVG's James Maher in August 2016, Hirshorn lamented the changing neighborhood.
Basically within a five-minute walk [today] most of the East Village that I’ve known over the course of 25, almost 30 years is gone, just gone, not like in bits and pieces, shifting here and there — just one fell swoop. Just to see everything radically redeveloped is what’s so stunning, because it used to happen in bits and pieces as the real estate went up. Now they’re doing blocks instead of buildings.
An EVG reader emailed us to say, "He was a wonderfully sweet, quirky man and a brilliant painter and photographer. I'm glad to have called him a friend."
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