Heather Hutchison: Glowing

“Subtle, seductive, and tempting to touch, there is a resonance and resilience in theses works that is unique.  The associative canon that wax has acquired over the ages whispers through these boxes, caressing, as it were, the light that comes through.”

-Jeff Wright

Heather Hutchison was born (1964) in Philomath, OR, and was raised a many points between the high desert of Bisbee, AZ and the atmospheric mist of the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently works and resides in upstate 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 as well as being included in the 44th Biennial Exhibition of American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She has exhibited in dozens of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions over nearly three decades. 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.   Recently, Hutchison has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Gottlieb Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hutchison’s works have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artnews and Art in America, among others.

 

"Hers is not an allover esthetic, but one that seeks the center. While some of her titles refer to structural characteristics-Nine High, or Division I, for example-others such as Resurrection or For All the People Who Have Died attest to religious or metaphysical concerns."

—Regan Upshaw, Art in America 

"Over the past seventeen years, Hutchison has developed a visual language that uses components of painting such as light, color and depth to express intangible aspects of life such as emotion, memory and the passage of time."

—Sue Scott, adjunct curator, The Orlando Museum of Art 

"Hutchison’s sharp-edged rectangular planes are ethereal atmospheres that exploit the oppositional nature of her materials-the transparency of her support (Plexiglas) and the opacity of her surface (wax). Monument (1995) aptly demonstrates the artist’s post-Minimalist approach to form and content, as she creates interplay between the pure geometry of rectilinear forms and the primordial associations of her muted earth tones. Scraping and repainting, simultaneously revealing and concealing layers of color, the artist reinforces the concept of the flat plane as an allusive arena by clearly revealing her wood-stretcher support system and the geometry of her intersecting rectangles. From these reductive means, she creates the illusion of depth, atmosphere and luminosity."

—Terrie Sultan, curator of contemporary art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art