Asymmetry and Alignment: Exhibition

The Department of Art and Art History is very excited to present Asymmetry and Alignment, an installation of new paintings by Oliver Sutter. 

Sutter’s rich painterly surfaces embrace the immediacy of the present moment feeling fully charged and switched on. With careful compositional nuance and chromatic refinement, his visually active works refrain from ascending high, diving deep, or spinning out of control; rather, the movements are fluidly agitating towards an unpredictable equilibrium. Planes of wet into wet brushstrokes are playfully peppered with textural spots, these impulsive events may allude to a joyful stream of consciousness allowing us to focus on the purity of color. 

From painting to painting the arrangements of spots appear natural and intuitive without a grid orientation or a rigid plan. Jittery color variance adds extra momentum to his brushstroke gestures. Sutter’s compositions invite comparisons to environmental phenomena – leaves wind swept across the ground, falling raindrops creating a puddle, or desert rocks scattered amid a sandy terrain.  It’s almost as though these fields of color possess an internal soundtrack of gentle hums and fuzzy tones that filter out peripheral distractions. 

Always interested in what a painting can be, Sutter breaks from a rectangular format and presents works using triangle and pentagon shapes. These geometric works can allude to both positive and negative forms. The slender triangle can be viewed as an aerodynamic wing or as a split in the gallery wall revealing a different dimension; the pentagon maybe seen as a solid architectural component or as an expanding aperture with shifting angles. Three green rectangular works offer different views of the same imaginary space, which might be the cloudy atmosphere of a sci-fi universe or a sugary color flow in a candy landscape.

Gallery Hours:
Monday – Friday 9:00 am – 5:00 pm or by appointment
Admission is free