CREATURE

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to present Creature, an exhibition of new work by Lisa McCutcheon.

McCutcheon’s lush, lyrical visual language creates a push and pull between representation and abstraction, teetering between the “knowable” and the enigmatic. Buoyant, organic forms are built up in layers of varying transparency, including drawing and painting on mylar and photographs transferred onto a delicate, silk-like fabric. These photographic images are drawn primarily from nature—petals, leaves, feathers, minerals—which McCutcheon carefully fragments before interlacing with other compositional elements. As well as a greater abundance of brighter colors, these newest works are distinguished by their notable increase in layering, which enhances their intricacy and the complexity of their internal juxtapositions.

As much as McCutcheon builds up her forms, so too does she deconstruct them: whether layering over details to edit them down or tearing away material to open shapes up, she is dedicated to a philosophy of “taking away to add.” In this way, she activates the relationship between positive and negative space, channels and orchestrates the energy of forms, and simplifies excess to balance free fall into maximalism. The works, as a result, exude a sense of dynamism, excitement, and mystery. They ask us to sit with them and to spend time exploring their imagery and architecture, which, as we look, gives way to new observations and glimmers of recognition. Slowly, the art begins to reveal itself.

The forms in her larger works also underscore this sense of the emergent: they appear on the verge of coming to life. Undulating across the paper as if rising and falling with the wind—as in Creature (2024)—or as if moving in wave-like motions down a river, McCutcheon’s forms inch closer and closer to materializing into some knowable, nameable body. And yet, they never do. Neither fully abstract nor fully representational, they remain held in perfectly balanced tension. In this space, the eye can delight in the harmony achieved between high- chroma and desaturated colors, painterly marks and photographic elements, visual textures and smooth passages, and the symphony of layers and the quiet of the white space. This is what lends them not only their visceral impact but also their beauty and, ultimately, their irresistibility.

Lisa McCutcheon earned her MFA in painting in 2001 from the San Francisco Art Institute and lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has exhibited across the United States and exhibited as part of Dolby Chadwick Gallery’s group shows Here and Now, Lightning Strikes, and Lightning Strikes II. McCutcheon also curated the November 2021 exhibition at San Francisco’s Root Division. This will be her second exhibition at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.