Tyra Hutchens

recent paintings attempts to reclaim painting as a viable vehicle to poetically express an anxious and uncertain world at large and a painter’s interior world.

In recent paintings, semi-frozen landscapes reflect a dystopian world were objects are strangely suspended and embedded to explore concepts of dislocation, disintegration, nothingness — ideas in which the human stain has created its own ruination.

Tyra Hutchens has been active for nearly five decades, and recent paintings is the result of research that draws upon a rich storehouse of influences—from the Old Masters of the 16th to 19th centuries, including Titian, Velázquez, Turner and Goya, through to Surrealism’s use of mystery and the irrational, and the expressive qualities in abstract painting.

On this work, Dr. Sheridan Palmer said, “Tyra Hutchens provides us with a portal to another world, a dystopian tempest where strange remnants are mysteriously suspended, embedded or shoot through unstable landscapes. His imagery teeters on the edge of a subverted reality inhabited by scarred, pipe-like forms and heavy, dismembered tubular conduits that seep or eject steamy fluids. These stir the memory of when wars and plagues wrecked havoc, but he also potentially takes us forward to a catastrophic climate. In this Hutchens constructs an expanded universe beyond humanity and delves into the heart of darkness, with works operating at a pitch comparable to those of Bosch, Breughel, Goya, Blake and Peter Booth. Thus, he reminds us of humankind’s propensity to create conditions that sabotage the very things that sustain it.This is not altogether an easy exhibition, neither appeasing nor evading issues concerning our threatened environment and existence, but visually and conceptually it is a breath-taking one.”

Simon Lawrie wrote, “Artists are rightfully wary of being pinned down with explanations, and Hutchens’ new series of paintings certainly avoids such fixity and stagnation. Meaning is contingent and precarious, issuing forth in ambiguity from between forms and abstractions, figures and grounds, styles and histories. The trauma and calamity of a dark romanticism colours these canvases, offset by the ontological and semiotic insights of Lacanian theory and deconstruction. These enigmatic works address the lacuna between words and things, between representation and reality, intimating an existence that is anterior to our experience of it. Hutchens synthesis of pictorial schemes, objects and environments creates an atmosphere of liminal familiarity: equivocal entities and indefinite spaces point to the inherent instability, but also the potentiality, of meaning in our relationship to the world.”

To read more on these paintings, read the catalogue from Tyra Hutchens’ 2016 solo Teeter at the Glen Eira City Council Gallery.