June 6 - July 8, 2013
Profound and fragile, Sidney Hutter’s sculptural forms belie their less-is-more aesthetic, with an animation of shape and color that is boldly crowd pleasing.
The visual pyrotechnics notwithstanding, Sidney Hutter has been obsessed with the vessel form since he was a young artist. He isn’t a vessel maker like the glass blowers; his forms have no utilitarian function. Nonetheless his has been a slow and steady rumination upon the very concept of vessel-ness.
The vessel form is closely attached to our understanding of glass blowing. The physical attributes of the material itself are such that when air is forced through a pipe into molten gathered glass, the natural tendency of the material is to expand into a rounded vessel. The container shape in its turn is charged with physical and spiritual meaning.
Instead of imbuing the forms he creates with a shape informed by the use of heat and breath to expand the material, Hutter works the glass cold, cutting, grinding and polishing pieces that he will assemble using adhesives into the sensuous, rounded forms that are his idealization of the vessel.
The integration of a visual reference to cellular DNA embedded within the vessel form links the sculptures metaphorically with the figure, the womb, and maternity. For Hutter there is a spiritual and physical harmony in the marriage of two images, the vessel idealized, and the spiraling chromosomes that are the code of life itself
Finally we may come back to the visual fireworks; the ever-shifting and refracting color; the disappearing act as the form dissolves into gesture and suggestion. So even in their quiet elegance these works are animated by the collaboration of color and light.
Ken Saunders, 2013
Artist | Sidney Hutter