For Through the Gallery Thomas Hutton presents a site-specific sculpture entitled The Fourth Wall and invites you into Sushi Bar Gallery to look both at and through its physical and semantic perimeters.
 
Sushi Bar Gallery is an art gallery created in 2014 by artist Maayan Strauss inside her own studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Described by Strauss as “a sculpture of a gallery,” the space acts as an intensified context for the display and viewing of artwork that is complicated by the muddied boundaries between studio and gallery and between artwork and containing space.
 
Through the Gallery is Thomas Hutton’s response to the particular spatial and conceptual attributes of Sushi Bar Gallery. Instead of installing in the gallery space itself (or on its walls), Hutton shifts the attention to its open ends, to the walls that do not exist to separate the studio from the gallery. Working inside the narrow width where that wall would be, the otherwise invisible perimeter becomes a frame and framework for looking inside and outside of the gallery onto the vistas of New York.
 
Thomas Hutton’s sculptures explore the tectonics and materiality of contemporary architectural space and the complexities of its relationship to images.
 
Thomas Hutton (b. London 1983) has an MFA in sculpture from Yale University (2012) and MA in Architectural History from The University of Edinburgh (2006). He has had recent solo exhibitions at Hunter / Whitfield, London (2015) and Joni Levy, Zurich (2014) and recent group exhibitions include ‘Maybe your Lens is Scratched’, The Averard Hotel, London (2016), 'From the Club of Rome' (curated by Corin Hewitt), Virginia Commonwealth University (2016) and  'Conversation Piece Part I', Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2015). He lives in Athens, Greece.
 

Sushi Bar Gallery is an art gallery inside an artist’s studio. 

A “sushi bar” is a bar where sushi is served.
 
A “bar” is a horizontal surface that divides the space between server (who displays) and customer (who views).
 
A bar is a length of metal.
 
A bar is a band of light.
 
A gallery is where art is displayed and viewed.
 
A gallery is the upper-most viewing balcony of a theatre.
 
In a theatre, the “fourth wall” is the invisible wall at the edge of the stage that divides the actors and the audience. 
 
A stage is a barrier.
 
A barrier divides space.
 
The word “barrier” originates from the French word “barriere” from “barre” meaning “bar”. *
 
 
* Excerpt from Thomas Hutton’s Notes (2014-present)