A magnetic interactive sculptural piece by artist Alice Hutchins. This rare and unusual piece is very conceptional in its approach in that Mrs. Hutchins gives each individual the tools to interpret her concept to create their own piece of art. The set comprises of a large painted cylindrical magnet, along with a number of different size steel balls. Through the powerful magnet, these balls can be arranged in anyway desired, and with each attempt a new arrangement is achieved, with no two ever being the same.
Alice Hutchins was born in 1916, in Van Nuys, California. After studying history and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, she spent the late nineteen-thirties through the forties living in California, Virginia, Michigan, Washington, D.C. and Cairo, Egypt, with her husband and two children. Hutchins and her family settled in France in 1950, two years prior to the appearance in print of Harold Rosenberg's unabashedly anti-formalist celebration of the liberation of American art from the hegemony of School of Paris modernism. She returned to the United States and spent her last years, very active, in Southern California, and died there October 25, 2009.
Hutchins' interactive magnetic assemblages re-describe the spectator's role in the artistic process by inviting the receiver to alter her sculptural elements of ball bearings, screws, nuts, bolts, coils, cubes and cylinders at will. The artist's works and papers are housed under the auspices of Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary arts and provide important evidence about the inter-relationship among participants in the Paris avant-garde of the late 1960s and the New York Fluxus collective.
The particular example, called "Nebula" dates circa 1971, and is complete with the original styrofoam box, outer sleeve, and inner triangular folding information pamphlet with the artists own words on the piece. A very rare chance to own a piece of Hutchin's work whose art is held in the permanent collections of such museums as the Tate in London, Pompidou, Getty, MoMa.
