Peter Arthur Hutchinson (born 1930) is a British-born artist living in the United States. Hutchinson is one of the pioneers of the Land Art movement.[1]
He is also considered a narrative and mixed media, conceptual artist.[2] Along his photo-collages, he uses gouache, woad, and handwritten texts which reveal his playful wit and prioritization of subjective experience as an important part of his artworks.[3]
Hutchinson is known for his photo-based conceptual artworks in which he documents his ephemeral interventions on the landscape itself. These interventions often utilize flowers, food, and found objects to interact with the landscape, including the ocean, mountains, fields, beaches, volcanoes, icebergs, deserts, and other natural environments. Photographs of these interventions are accompanied by handwritten text describing the work, along with the date that the work occurred.[8] Although sometimes, as a witty pun, the date on the work itself is not the date when it was actually realized (see example on Wikimedia Commons.)[9]
Hutchinson was inspired by early landscape painting and garden art, explained in part by his English roots, and also by his early interest in plant genetics.[10] He often focuses on subjects about relationship between humans, animals, and nature and observes processes and changes, such as ecological systems of growth and decay in nature. In his biographical notes to his exhibit of 1977 (Selected Works 1968-1977[11]), Hutchinson documented an example of such early work at the Paricutin volcano in Mexico where, in 1970, he laid a 100-yard line of bread along faults at the crater edge. This bread was used to grow mold over a 6-day period with the change in color visible from photos of the volcano taken from the air.
Hutchinson also used palindromes in his work “Step on no pets” in 1973, and “God saw I was Dog, Dog saw I was God” in 1976, set of 5 color and black and white photographs, a piece in the permanent collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, in Paris, France.[12]
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2019 Peter Hutchinson: Landscapes of My Life, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, USA[13]
2012 “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974” at the MOCA Los Angeles, CA[21]
2003 “Look, it’s snowing (Schizogeography of Everyday Life)” at the International Center for Art and Landscape, Isle of Vassivière, France[22]
2001 “About Face: Selections from the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY[23]
1999 “Sight Gags: Grotesque, Caricature and Wit in Modern and Contemporary Drawings” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY[24]
1991 “Unnatural Attitudes” at the International Center for Art and Landscape (Centre National d’Art et du Paysage - Vassivière et Limousin), Isle of Vassivière, France[25]
1986 “Naked/Nude: Contemporary Prints” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY[26]
1976 “Photography for Collectors” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY[27]
