Mini-retrospective

    At Winchester Galleries on Broad Street

    Opening:
    Saturday January 30, 2010,  2 pm – 4pm

    Last day of exhibition:Sunday (afternoon only) Feb. 14, 2010

    Paul Hutner has lived in Victoria since 1990.  He was born in Toronto and studied at the innovative New School of Art in the 1960s, a pivotal period in the development of Canadian art.  Hutner developed a practice that has been recognized by thirteen solo exhibitions of his work at the Sable-Castelli Gallery and its predecessors the Dunkelman Gallery and the Jared Sable Gallery.  Under the auspices of the Art Gallery of Ontario, a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Art Gallery of Peterborough (1991) and The Gallery, Stratford (1992).  Hutner has been represented in numerous museum group exhibitions over a period of forty years.  Public collections of his work include the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Norman Mackenzie Gallery (Regina), Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton), Art Gallery of Windsor, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Memorial University Art Gallery, Nickle Art Gallery (University of Calgary), Concordia University Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank and other collections.  His work is also in many private collections.  This is his sixth exhibition at Winchester Galleries (his third at the Broad Street location).

    Hutner is one of Canada's most original artists.  His work balances strong abstract structures with literal references to objects, narratives and landscapes.  His earliest exhibited works were conceptual drawings/site-specific installations; his paintings continue to be concerned with delineating space and place and are filled with references to personal memories and experiences (but exclude the psychological and neurotic references that are often the focus of personal narrative in art).

    The strategy of making visible the process of an image’s construction has been fundamental to Hunter’s work over forty years.  Highly controlled gestures in the paintings are neither physical evidence of the subconscious nor the automatic impersonality of colour field surface; rather, they are careful pictures of writings and paint strokes.  Similarly, the paintings unpack the views and images that are their subjects: the editing process of the eye and intellect that happens when we look at the external world is made obvious in the paintings.  In their concern with revealing process, the paintings are similar to structural cinema wherein the process and technical aspects of making a film become subjects of the film itself.

    Much from modernist visual aesthetics is deployed by Hutner.  His overlapping, repeated and sometimes whirling motifs conjure Futurists Joseph Stella and Gino Severini; grids evoke Sol le Wit and early Frank Stella; words, calligraphy and classical references draw from Cy Twombly, whose work has been a major influence; the treatment of landscape and colour palette evoke Marsden Hartley.  References to the highly graphic works of Pop artists such as Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Jasper Johns can be detected, too.  With their transparency about process, Hutner’s images also bring to mind the collage works of Robert Rauchenberg.  The strong linear patterns evident in Hutner's work evoke another highly individualist Canadian artist, John Meredith.  Hutner’s own cohort – artists like Harold Klunder, Alex Cameron, Erik Gamble and Andre Fauteau – helped form his artistic approach, as well.  But Hunter has always been a highly original and individualistic painter whose work defies categorization. 

    For this mini-retrospective, six major paintings have been assembled.  Although small in numbers, it is a spectacular exhibition and recognition of one of Canada’s foremost painters.

     

     

Paul Hutner