NICHOLAS HUTCHESON : Salvage Exhibition at Dickerson Gallery Sydney- August 2007

About the Works in the Exhibition

Details:
Where: Dickerson Gallery, Melbourne Australia
When: 7th February 2007 to early March 2007
Opening Night: 6-8pm 7th February 2007
Address: 2A Waltham St Richmond Victoria 3121
ph: (03)9429 1569 fax: (03)9429 9415
www.dickersongallery.com.au

Outsized and striking, the works of Nicholas Hutcheson construct interior landscapes from vestiges of skin, bone and bark – simultaneously familiar and surprising. Hutcheson’s strong gestural line and deft use of colour produces arresting and unsettling works of complexity and originality.

In the series of paintings - ‘Vessels’, the human form is filled with shapes and contour lines, intersections and boundaries, becoming a fleshy container. Deposited layers of drawing, colour and texture are eroded to expose anatomical landscapes overlaid with the patina of time.

Addition and subtraction shape the process: surfaces of oil paint are exposed to fire, scraped back and chiselled away, pencil lines and raw pigment are laid down in a cycle which continues over and again.

Earlier works (produced after travelling through South America and Australia’s arid outback) respond to the mummies of the Atacama desert and the remains of animals and trees. Preserved in aridity, the desiccated forms come to resemble the geography and geology of the land itself: layers of strata contoured by the millennia.

Hutcheson gives us trees shedding bark alongside the disinterred remains of a 15th-century Inca girl – and reveals the beauty beneath the surface of skin.

Born in Buckinghamshire, England, Hutcheson studied at Bristol Art School in the 1990’s and since graduating has exhibited widely throughout the UK and in Australia. After extensive travels through South America, Hutcheson came to Australia in 2003. Nicholas currently makes Melbourne his home.

Last year Hutcheson received the prestigious Bundanon Residency spending 6 weeks at Arthur Boyd's property on the Shoalhaven River in NSW.