PETER HUTCHINSON
August 30 - September 29, 2019
Opening reception, Friday, August 30, 6 - 9 pm
Gaa Gallery Provincetown

Gaa Gallery Provincetown is pleased to present a selection of works from artist Peter Hutchinson, international trailblazer of the Land Art and Narrative Art movements and longtime resident of Provincetown, MA. The exhibition opens Friday, August 30, from 6-9pm with a reception with the artist at 494 Commercial Street, entrance Howland Street. 

Peter Hutchinson (b. 1930, London England) has for over 50 years created conceptual, tactile, innovative work that has been exhibited worldwide in esteemed galleries and institutions, most recently the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; the Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; the Arp Museum, Rolandseck, Germany; and the Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany.  His intellectual approach to found material, lyricism, and elemental conflation has long yielded two and three dimensional works marked by a freshness of thought and spirited composition. 

The works in this exhibition, a range of collages spanning from the 1970’s to present, pair Hutchinson’s trademark handwritten text with created landscapes rich in color and dimension.  The artist composes with cut images of heavy blooms, tropical birds, eastern gulls, gem-blue skies, icecaps, and more, and the yield is a sort of impossible paradise. These pieces bring unlike elements together in a visual format that suggests disappearance as much as it revels in fantasy.   

“Nature knows the answer to questions we don’t know to ask,” reads the text across the bottom of Hutchinson’s 2018 collage “Investigating Nature,” and these words might well be applied to the artist’s decades-long practice of curiosity. Hutchinson embraces nature, a laymen’s science, literature, and chance as avenues toward a simplified state of existence and awareness. These new works are both meditative and foreboding, with contemporary applications that reanimate the role of the independent mind and the possible futures of the natural world.  The exhibition is on view through September 29. 

Peter Hutchinson lives and works in Provincetown, MA. He is a pivotal figure in the Narrative Art and Land Art movements of the 1960s and 70s, as well as a master gardener and process photographer, creating work that explores the layered, interrelated qualities of nature and language. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Hutchinson has exhibited his work extensively in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Gaa Projects Cologne in Germany; Gaa Gallery in Provincetown; Freight and Volume Gallery in New York; and Blancpain Art Contemporain in Geneva. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York.The New Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and elsewhere.