Infinite Horizons: Works by Heather Hutchison and Ruth Pastine
May 16 – June 27, 2026
Opening reception: May 28, 5-7pm
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Infinite Horizons, an exhibition of luminous works by Heather Hutchison and Ruth Pastine. Though they work in different media, the artists share a preoccupation with the spiritual, philosophical, and emotional experience of time, space, and light. Hutchison’s mixed media constructions and Pastine’s oils on canvas and paper alchemically transcend their materiality, dissolving into hazy implications of perpetual vistas and limitless color fields. The interface of artwork, atmosphere, and mind cohere into a seamless spectrum of sensory encounters that can never be experienced the same way twice. These points of stillness dilate and contract along an eternal experiential horizon, governed by the constant and inevitable forces of change.
Hutchison’s plywood and Plexiglas compositions trap and revel in ambient light. Her humble, experimental, and often unconventional materials undergo a miraculous metamorphosis once they are sealed inside of her wood boxes and allow the available light to enter and dance through them. The works are in constant flux, transfigured by the passage of time and the vicissitudes of light to activate singular moments across a boundless continuum of shifting perception and environment. Hutchison maps nature’s mercurial patterns and the chaotic impacts of climate change to life’s many seasons and uncertainties. Abstracted allusions to sturdy mountains, veils of clouds, and glowing orbs breathe and billow, wax and wane with the changing light, marking time like the phases of the moon. Light flickers through the boxes like fireflies in a glass jar, effulgent mementos of life’s beauty and impermanence.
Pastine creates what she regards as “objects of direct experience,” material vessels that substantiate the ineffable junction where light, matter, and perception converge. Color provides a metaphysical access point for sensorial pleasure and existential inquiry, orchestrated by Pastine within prescribed complementary color systems that offer unlimited permutations. She realizes her soft, seamlessly transitioning bands of color purely through accumulated layers of oil paint applied with a simple brush, energetically mixing wet into wet until they resolve into finely tuned and intuitively complete entities. The more paint Pastine adds, the more its materiality paradoxically dissolves, an effect enhanced by beveled stretchers that levitate the painted surface off the wall. Her works resonate within the eye and mind, mediated by emotional response and the quality of the surrounding light. As substantial as they are evanescent, they assert a robust physicality against a confluence of endlessly mutable perceptual circumstances.
Works by Heather Hutchison are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., amongst others. Her work is included in the exhibition Painting in Color, on view through August 9, 2026 at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH. Louis Stern Fine Arts represents Hutchison on the West Coast. Works by Ruth Pastine are included in numerous public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Her solo exhibition Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime is on view May 16 – August 2, 2026 at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA.
Image caption:
Heather Hutchison (b. 1964)
Mound Memory, 2025
mixed media, reclaimed Plexiglas, plywood box
23 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 3 5/8 inches; 59.7 x 64.8 x 9.2 centimeters
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