Winston Wächter Fine Art is pleased to announce Heather Hutchison: Seeker, its third exhibition of New York-based artist Heather Hutchison. Hutchison’s luminous three dimensional paintings manipulate light, color and shadow to create works that evoke landscapes and weather patterns while remaining in constant flux. The works in this exhibition span from the late 1980s to today. Looking at Hutchison’s ongoing and recurring study of the natural world’s dynamic force, art critic Eleanor Heartney writes:
From the outside, the boxes are solid, workaday and finite, but inside they seem to have expanded to contain indeterminate depths. Their mysterious contents respond to the surrounding light and change as the viewer moves. Inside the boxes, light emanates from diffuse bands of color, seeps through translucent orbs and bounces off rippling waves. Forms are evoked but refuse to completely resolve. Instead, like half recovered memories, they conjure the mere suggestion of glowing sunsets, reflective waters, mist covered hills, moonlit plains, low lying fog and recently the blaze and smoke of wildfires and cloud feedback.
Hutchison has long been a keen observer of nature and has for decades been inspired by the human experiences of love, joy, loss and death. Hutchison’s work has always sought movement as a priority, beginning in the late 1980s with her translucent beeswax pieces, painted on a plexiglass surface covering a shadow box. These paintings utilized the depth and structure of the plywood box, which remained visible and framed them. Hutchison went on to alter the plexiglass itself, scoring and bending the plane on which she worked. In the past decade she has utilized materials such as gels, tape and mirrors, making the light contained within her pieces more kinetic and illustrating the truism that the only constant is change.
In Bisbee, Arizona, while attending a recent residency at the Central School Project, an organization housed in the same building where she attended elementary school, Hutchison began incorporating orbs, lines, arches and curves into her work, inspired by the play of the light in the Mule Mountains. These pieces emphasize the multidimensional aspect of her work, which has been a constant. In her triptych Night Break, panels within the boxes boomerang the light through the painted, smokey-green plexiglass. The light moves with the viewer, like the moon on a calm sea. The weightlessness of the piece is anchored by a horizontal lavender band across the bottom of the three panels.
In the essay accompanying the exhibition “Heather Hutchison’s Living Light”, Eleanor Heartney states, “Transmuting her experiences and emotions into pure light and color, Hutchison creates meditative spaces where we might pause and reinforce our own connections to earth, sky and spirit.”
Heather Hutchison was born in Corvallis, OR, in 1964. She was raised between coastal Oregon, Marin County and the southern border in Bisbee, Arizona. Her self-directed studies as an artist brought her from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City in 1986. She currently works and resides in Woodstock, New York. Hutchison has been included in numerous museum exhibitions including those at the Brooklyn Museum, Montclair Art Museum, the Smithsonian, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and the 44th Biennial Exhibition of American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Her work is held in several public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Hutchison’s works have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum, The Los Angeles Times, Artnews, and Art in America.
