Untitled was an exhibition by artist and curator James N Hutchinson that challenged the traditional form of the solo show. Featuring new and recent drawings based on, or directly representing, the work of other artists, the exhibition suggested that an artist’s practice is best examined as a complex set of entanglements with art history and contemporary peer networks.
Untitled dealt with ideas of authenticity by presenting replicas, copies and forgeries that were selected, commissioned or directly created by Hutchinson. This included a new set of drawings by Hutchinson that copied photographs of work by other, often well-known, artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Michelangelo Pistoletto or Marcel Duchamp.
Hutchinson’s drawings were presented within a nexus of works by other contemporary artists, historical works and archive material. Using curatorial – as well as artistic – strategies, this complex display considered unseen narratives behind, and the unintended relations between various artworks, complicating a linear and artist-centric view of art history.
In The Tetley’s atrium Hutchinson presented The Manenberg Tornado, 2018, a set of 24 detailed drawings based on amateur botanical paintings by Margaret Stewart. For Hutchinson, these works are a way to consider how artworks grant or deny access to particular narratives, and how other methodologies can be incorporated into art practice to generate wider networks of meaning. A display of archive material relating to Harry Thubron (1915–1985), a renowned Leeds educator, is also presented as an invitation to reflect back on the exhibition.
Untitled at The Tetley ran concurrently with Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019 exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery. Hutchinson exhibited a video shot in Leeds Art Gallery in Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2001, following his graduation from Leeds Metropolitan University.
With thanks to Leeds Museums and Galleries, the National Arts Education Archive at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The Whitworth, University of Manchester.