ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present Sessional Instructor Daniel Hutchinson'a solo exhibition: Mirror, Mirror

abstract artwork
Friday, March 4, 2016 - 5:00am to Saturday, April 2, 2016 - 4:00am

ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present Sessional Instructor DANIEL HUTCHINSON: MIRROR, MIRROR, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Hamilton-based artist. The exhibition will be on view in the Main Gallery space from March 4 to April 2, 2016. An opening reception will be held on FridayMarch 4, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM.

While a glancing impression of the artist’s deceptively austere and minimalist canvases may lead one to see Hutchinson’s work in the lineage of Malevich who inaugurated the black monochrome as a sign of painting’s endgame in 1915 (two years before Marcel Duchamp exhibited his equally apocalyptic Urinal in 1917) or the black monochromes of Ad Reinhardt or black on black paintings of Pierre Soulages, Hutchinson’s paintings are monochromes only semantically. Certainly, the artist often uses low tonal value dark paint (an assumption this show will challenge), but his pictures are rather teeming with pictorial incidence and delicate, refined brushwork. And while Hutchinson prizes the compositional aesthetic of the allover, his pictures are resolutely pictorial and sensual, instead of calculatedly non-objective. But like Soulages and Reinhardt, Hutchinson’s pictures promote and reward long durations of immersive looking as they dramatize the gaze of the viewer. And what he also shares with the most advanced modernist painters is an impulse to reduce his parameters of expression in the hopes of plumbing and mining them for their full creative potential.  

His fourth solo-exhibition at Angell Gallery promises even those familiar with Hutchinson’s corpus several surprises. First, the artist moves even further away from the figurative and towards full-blown abstraction, facing head on the problem of ornament and the decorative. Second, while the motif of the dark monochrome persists, Hutchinsonintroduces vibrant colours and floral motifs drawn from local textile stores and visits to the nearby tropical greenhouse. One work the artist showed me was produced through a technique similar to Surrealist grattage where the artist picked up patterns from the wood panel floorboards of his studio space.

 

Venue & Address: 
Angell Gallery 1444 Dupont St., Unit 15 (Entrance off Campbell Ave.) Toronto, Ontario
Website: 
http://www.dbhutchinson.com/mirror-mirror.html
http://www.angellgallery.com/artist/daniel-hutchinson/exhibition/mirror-mirror