NEW CANAAN, CONN.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art is presenting Charlie Hewitt. Heart of Gold, a mixed media exhibition featuring paintings, works-on-paper, ceramics and sculpture. The show opened June 21th and will be on display through August 19th.
Hewitt’s work channels the social upheaval of the 1960s, the laborers and mill-towns of his native Maine, and the gritty urban landscape of the Bowery in New York City. He expresses his life experiences through an abstraction rich with emotive content. These personal associations come through in colorful, energetic, at times scrappy and idiosyncratic mixed-media compositions on canvas, works-on-paper, prints, welded sculpture, and ceramics. Hewitt’s work is informed by the spontaneous automatism techniques and processes of the New York School artists. He is always inventing and creating, switching and revisiting mediums, even delving into film to express his ideas. In the case of his process, the term ‘action painting’, the physical act of painting itself, is more appropriately dubbed as ‘action artist’: Hewitt applies equal visceral energy to whatever medium he is crossing into.
The show features a selection of recent abstract paintings and works-on-paper that keep representation to a minimum. For the most part, his iconic tool imagery is more restrained and the paintings are a bit more ambiguous. They are activated instead by the push and pull of the picture plane with the use of collage, abstract wet drips, brush strokes and scrawls. Their jazzy color compositions suggest continuous mutation of forms and movement. Like Hewitt himself, his works do not sit still.
More recognizable Hewitt iconography is noticed in his sculpture and ceramics. On view are his “Urban Rattles”, quasi totemic-like structures he dubs “doodles in steel.” These sculptures hold geometric forms or more representational bird houses in bright colors. Hewitt’s most famous Urban Rattle stands tall at the High Line in New York City and two other more monumental in size are in Portland and Lewiston, Maine. Also featured in the show is a body of works in ceramic. Hewitt approaches these works with great candor, energetically exploring the medium with more recognizable motifs and signature calligraphy. His work can be found at the Whitney Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among other notable public and private collections.
