ART Full color continues painter’s evolution

Last October, artist Amy Hutcheson had a breakthrough exhibition at Playhouse on the Square called “Transformation.” Her show of more recent work, on display through June 3 in the Nathan and Dorothy Shainberg Art Gallery at Memphis Jewish Community Center, is also called “Transformation,” and it carries the changes manifest in the previous exhibition in a new direction.

I described the ink, graphite and gesso pieces in last year’s show as “dynamic, brutal and gestural” and the graphite drawings as “more delicate, lyrical and sensual.” Considering the materials, all of those works occurred in various shades of gray, black and white. While figurative, their subjects were dislocated and mythologized through quick brushstrokes and abstraction to states of almost mechanistic quasi-cubism; some were witty, sly and subversive.

The new “Transformation” exhibit at MJCC surprises first by being completely in color. The 18 paintings, mainly oil on canvas with a few on board, fill the gallery with rich, vibrant hues. While carrying forward the structural technique of last year’s work — that is, the dissecting and dislocating of the body so that bone and muscle are one with the artist’s gesture and inner vision — these pieces are calmer, less witty yet statelier and almost monumental in effect.

Hutcheson wears her influences on her sleeve: Matisse, Picasso, de Kooning. In at least one sense, these names seem entirely appropriate since the depiction of women — or Woman — was among these artists’ primary preoccupations. Many of the paintings in this exhibition portray in some guise a female figure both powerful and tranquil, though sometimes as languid as one of Matisse’s odalisques or as forthright as one of de Kooning’s fractured and glaring Earth Mothers.

What captures the viewer’s attention on close examination is the tensile balance between the structural elements of the paintings and the patches and swathes of color that flesh them out. Hutcheson uses graphite, I assume, to sketch quickly the outlines of her figures, and then brushes in defining pigment that alternates from riotous juxtapositions of orange, red and yellow to cool blues and greens.

The most impressive pieces in this show are the largest, and not just because of size. Hutcheson seems to need some space, some scope to make her technique work most cohesively; a group of smaller paintings, that is, 24-by-24-inches, feel not just sketchy but unrealized.

The most expansive paintings — “Interior with Figure” and “Mother’s Quilt” at 48-by-48 inches, and “House of Cards,” 36-by-60 — carry themselves with confidence and a sense of completion.