Infinite Horizons: Works by Heather Hutchison and Ruth Pastine May 16 – June 27, 2026
Opening reception: May 28, 5-7pm
Artists in attendance
https://www.louissternfinearts.com/exhibitions/infinite-horizons-works-by-heather-hutchison-and-ruth-pastine#tab:thumbnails
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.
Opening reception: May 28, 5-7pm
Artists in attendance
https://www.louissternfinearts.com/exhibitions/infinite-horizons-works-by-heather-hutchison-and-ruth-pastine#tab:thumbnails
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.
Currier Museum of Art | Painting in Color Opens March 7, 2026
Presented in conversation with Spray: Jules Olitski in the 1960s the exhibition Painting in Color features four contemporary artists whose work continues the tradition of abstraction into the 21st century. Heather Hutchison (b. 1964), Joseph Marioni (1943–2024), Jane Swavely (b. 1959), and John Zurier (b. 1956) explore color, light, scale, and space in artworks that foreground visual perception and invite quiet reflection.
Like Olitski, who envisioned color suspended in the air like a fine mist, these artists explore painterly techniques to express visual and tactile experiences drawn from the natural world. Employing innovative approaches to painting, their works heighten sensory awareness, sharpen how we see, and invite new ways of looking. Together, the artists in Painting in Color advance the legacy of Jules Olitski’s spray paintings and affirm the lasting energy of color and abstraction.
November 15, 2025 – January 10, 2026 Perspective and Plane
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present
Perspective and Plane, a group exhibition
featuring pairs of works by the gallery’s estate and contemporary artists. Known for its
championing of historical artists like Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Karl Benjamin,
and Alfredo Ramos Martínez, Louis Stern Fine Arts has also fostered the careers of
contemporary living artists, including James Little, Mark Leonard, Mokha Laget, and
Cecilia Z. Miguez.
Perspective and Plane merges these two aspects of the gallery’s program. Works by
estate artists are presented in tandem with works by contemporary artists affiliated with
Louis Stern Fine Arts. Each work dialogues with its counterpart from a different era,
taking disparate approaches to similar subject matter or kindred aesthetic concerns; new
themes and interpretations emerge through the juxtaposition of past and present.
Paintings by Doug Ohlson and Mokha Laget both chafe and struggle against the
predetermined boundaries of the traditional canvas, while Lorser Feitelson’s sinuous
red line in a spare composition is reflected in three dimensions by the negative space in
Knopp Ferro’s hanging metal sculpture. Frederick Wight abstracts and elongates the
moon’s motion across the sky into a beam of light that is compacted and contained in
Chen Ruo Bing’s adjacent painting. Karl Benjamin and James Little dazzle with
contrasting patterns in a push-pull dance.
Heather Hutchison and Helen Lundeberg capture the elusiveness of fleeting light in
sculptural and painting form. Richard Wilson’s multi-toned grid is transmuted into the
welcoming glow of open windows when placed beside Mark Feldstein’s black-and-
white photograph of shuttered windows on a building’s façade. Cecilia Z. Miguez and
Ynez Johnston play with vertical frieze patterns of mysterious narrative imagery across
vastly different scales, while Mark Leonard and Alfredo Ramos Martínez question the
roles and meanings of architectural and communal spaces through absence and
presence.
Louis Stern Fine Arts represents the Estates of Karl Benjamin, Doug Ohlson,
Frederick Wight, Lorser Feitelson, Ynez Johnston, Mark Feldstein, Helen Lundeberg,
and Alfredo Ramos Martínez.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present
Perspective and Plane, a group exhibition
featuring pairs of works by the gallery’s estate and contemporary artists. Known for its
championing of historical artists like Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Karl Benjamin,
and Alfredo Ramos Martínez, Louis Stern Fine Arts has also fostered the careers of
contemporary living artists, including James Little, Mark Leonard, Mokha Laget, and
Cecilia Z. Miguez.
Perspective and Plane merges these two aspects of the gallery’s program. Works by
estate artists are presented in tandem with works by contemporary artists affiliated with
Louis Stern Fine Arts. Each work dialogues with its counterpart from a different era,
taking disparate approaches to similar subject matter or kindred aesthetic concerns; new
themes and interpretations emerge through the juxtaposition of past and present.
Paintings by Doug Ohlson and Mokha Laget both chafe and struggle against the
predetermined boundaries of the traditional canvas, while Lorser Feitelson’s sinuous
red line in a spare composition is reflected in three dimensions by the negative space in
Knopp Ferro’s hanging metal sculpture. Frederick Wight abstracts and elongates the
moon’s motion across the sky into a beam of light that is compacted and contained in
Chen Ruo Bing’s adjacent painting. Karl Benjamin and James Little dazzle with
contrasting patterns in a push-pull dance.
Heather Hutchison and Helen Lundeberg capture the elusiveness of fleeting light in
sculptural and painting form. Richard Wilson’s multi-toned grid is transmuted into the
welcoming glow of open windows when placed beside Mark Feldstein’s black-and-
white photograph of shuttered windows on a building’s façade. Cecilia Z. Miguez and
Ynez Johnston play with vertical frieze patterns of mysterious narrative imagery across
vastly different scales, while Mark Leonard and Alfredo Ramos Martínez question the
roles and meanings of architectural and communal spaces through absence and
presence.
Louis Stern Fine Arts represents the Estates of Karl Benjamin, Doug Ohlson,
Frederick Wight, Lorser Feitelson, Ynez Johnston, Mark Feldstein, Helen Lundeberg,
and Alfredo Ramos Martínez.
20 July - 5 October 2025 Lucent Ground Contemporary Perspectives on Abstraction
GW Contemporary is pleased to present Lucent Ground: Contemporary Perspectives on Abstraction, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, on view from July 20 through October 5, 2025. Curated by gallery founder Genevieve Williams, the exhibition brings together eleven international artists whose practices engage materiality and perception in deeply considered, often unexpected ways.
Lucent Ground explores surface, form, and visual experience - foregrounding artists whose works reward close looking. Subtle shifts in material and structure offer new ways of seeing, revealing a world where surfaces become thresholds, dimensionality is in flux, and structure and spontaneity exist in quiet tension.
Informed by movements such as Light and Space, minimalism, and post-minimal abstraction, the exhibition evokes a heightened sensitivity to light, texture, and the act of perception. Optical phenomena hover and recede; compositions unfold slowly, inviting a slowed way of looking - one attuned to nuance, reflection, and the physical presence of each object.
Featured artists include Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Heather Hutchison, Gary Lang, Jan Maarten Voskuil, Jonny Niesche, Mark Whalen, Rosalind Tallmadge, Will Cooke, Line Busch, and Nobuhito Nishigawara. Spanning multiple generations and geographies - including Southern California, New York, Australia, and Europe - their practices share a commitment to exploring abstraction as a space of inquiry, transformation, and poetic material engagement.
Located directly across from the Laguna Art Museum, GW Contemporary presents a curator-led program that fosters dialogue between emerging and established voices from the U.S., Australia, and beyond. Lucent Ground marks the beginning of a cross-cultural platform rooted in creative exchange, perceptual depth, and material exploration.
GW Contemporary is pleased to present Lucent Ground: Contemporary Perspectives on Abstraction, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, on view from July 20 through October 5, 2025. Curated by gallery founder Genevieve Williams, the exhibition brings together eleven international artists whose practices engage materiality and perception in deeply considered, often unexpected ways.
Lucent Ground explores surface, form, and visual experience - foregrounding artists whose works reward close looking. Subtle shifts in material and structure offer new ways of seeing, revealing a world where surfaces become thresholds, dimensionality is in flux, and structure and spontaneity exist in quiet tension.
Informed by movements such as Light and Space, minimalism, and post-minimal abstraction, the exhibition evokes a heightened sensitivity to light, texture, and the act of perception. Optical phenomena hover and recede; compositions unfold slowly, inviting a slowed way of looking - one attuned to nuance, reflection, and the physical presence of each object.
Featured artists include Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Heather Hutchison, Gary Lang, Jan Maarten Voskuil, Jonny Niesche, Mark Whalen, Rosalind Tallmadge, Will Cooke, Line Busch, and Nobuhito Nishigawara. Spanning multiple generations and geographies - including Southern California, New York, Australia, and Europe - their practices share a commitment to exploring abstraction as a space of inquiry, transformation, and poetic material engagement.
Located directly across from the Laguna Art Museum, GW Contemporary presents a curator-led program that fosters dialogue between emerging and established voices from the U.S., Australia, and beyond. Lucent Ground marks the beginning of a cross-cultural platform rooted in creative exchange, perceptual depth, and material exploration.