The Berlin studio of Irish German artist Paul Hutchinson is scattered with stuff, splayed out like a shrine to his evolving practice. Case in point: One of the last remaining prints of Vorwärts (2017) captures his beat-up black Reebok sneaker, its side seam split open from wear after two harsh winters.
“For me, that piece was key to understanding my own practice,” Hutchinson told Artsy. “There’s everything I want to convey in my practice: the culture I come from, the clothing and codes of youth culture, the roughness of growing up here—it’s carrying all of that inside.” These objects and works trace the themes that have come to define his practice: inequality, urban life, and social mobility.
For over a decade, Hutchinson has translated his observations into works of photography, text, and, more recently, performance. Last year, his first Paris solo show, “Hues,” opened at Bremond Capela, which represents the artist alongside Knust Kunz Gallery Editions and Sies + Höke. Collectors and institutions have taken notice: Hutchinson has pieces in the new show, “Where to? Kunsthalle/City/Society of the Future,” at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and his work red glow (2022) was purchased by the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, this past September. His work will also be on view in a new show at The Blanc in New York later this month.
Much of his practice has been communicated through books. In last year’s catalogue Remnants. Selected Works 2019–2024, Hutchinson photographed the remains of graffiti he noticed in Berlin’s labyrinthine transit system, turning chipped paint and layers of tags into abstraction and a potent metaphor for the city’s sanitization of self-expression. “I realized they’re about trying to scrape subculture away, and it still resists—there’s still some leftovers,” Hutchinson said.
As a native Berliner, the artist has witnessed the city’s historic subculture being gradually eroded; the city’s cultural budget slashed while rents and the cost of living skyrocket. The construction sites for luxury housing units inspired Stadt für Alle (City for All) (2020), “the ugliest book [he’s] ever done,” the artist joked during a recent studio visit. It presents images of cranes, excavators, and construction sites transforming Berlin’s urban sprawl, and remains one of the most important series for him personally. “There’s a German term called Machtarchitektur, [meaning] ‘architecture of power or authority.’ It’s solely about feeling pushed out of a city—pushing me out, my family out, all of my friends out.”
Hutchinson’s socioeconomic awareness began in the 1990s. He grew up working class in northern Schöneberg, a rough West Berlin neighborhood caught in the aftermath of the city’s reunification. His time was split between “smoking [and] causing trouble” on the streets and listening to live music inside his parents’ raucous Irish pub.
These two environments helped to shape his identity, but it was a funding program for low-income students that put him on the path toward artmaking. Hutchinson found his way to Valencia, Spain, on a study abroad program where he drifted into the school’s photography lab. “People were going to the beach and I was stuck in the darkroom,” he recalled. Photography intrigued him: “Although you’re making images that depict something that’s there, if you get it right, they can also depict what’s in you.”
Upon his return to Berlin, Hutchinson’s world fully opened up as he began to experiment with photography and travel, relying on scholarships and grants. “I feel so privileged having had that curiosity about stuff in my late teens and early twenties. I went all over the world and looked at shit, and that really has made me the person I am today,” he recalled.
Of all his adventures—from working with Magnum photographer Steve McCurry in New York in 2010 to a stint living abroad in Rio de Janeiro—it may be a period spent in London studying photography at Central Saint Martins that left the deepest mark. “Before going to Britain, I didn’t really know what capitalism meant,” he admitted. “After two years there, I saw it oozing out of everything. It made me sick.” Like many struggling art students, he took on a dead-end job working for Zara on Bond Street, before a cold email to Wolfgang Tillmans landed him a gig helping design the photographer’s many books. It was a formative era, but one that became financially unsustainable for the young artist once he’d graduated, prompting him to move back to Berlin in 2014.
In the decade since returning home, Hutchinson has settled into himself as he experimented with new media. His first major shift past the bounds of photography came in 2018, with the release of his first book in two languages: Texte und Bilder and Pictures & Words—two distinct versions of the same set of images, featuring original texts in either German or English. Layering his writing atop the photos was freeing, but the quality of the images was also key. “I’d taken that step and left behind a very conservative, pristine way of image-making,” he recalled. “When making this book, I thought: That’s what I want to speak about. The beauty of grainy culture and gritty roughness, and the beauty and the problems I see in it. And how, through that lens, I look at things happening today.”
In recent years, Hutchinson has also ventured into the realm of performance, turning texts into both sound pieces and readings that make use of his lilting Irish accent. “The vocalization of the writing really feels like part of my work by now,” he told Artsy as he dug around on his laptop to find the recording of his two-part performance piece Innere Stadt (City Within) (2025). Hutchinson pressed play on the more barbed second section, in English, which spoke directly to the city’s plan to slash €130 million ($152.8 million) from arts and culture funding in 2025.
“Do you really believe what you’re being told? There’s no waiting around where we’re from. Time to step up and call out what’s wrong.” It’s a charged performance, but one that speaks to Hutchinson’s lived reality as he juggles the pressures of being a working artist and enduring a cost-of-living crisis. “I’m not in it for the money, but if you have a child and a studio and rent to pay, you do have to think about it,” he said. “But on the other hand, I’m naively optimistic.”
The swirl of money and power may not stray far from his mind, but for Hutchinson, creating art isn’t about communicating some grand statement. “I don’t think I can speak any truths because there are no truths in that way,” he explained. “It’s just my lived experience. It’s what I’ve been through, what made me who I am, what I was born into.” The personal may often edge into the political, but Hutchinson’s aim isn’t just to invite critique; it’s to invite contemplation on reality itself: “One thing I feel touched by and inspired by that gets overlooked is a sense of wonder for the everyday; a sense of wonder for this place we live in.”
The Artsy Vanguard 2026
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Chris Erik Thomas
Chris Erik Thomas is a Berlin-based journalist and editor covering art, fashion, and culture. He previously worked as the digital editor at Art Düsseldorf for two editions of the fair, and his writing has appeared in Fantastic Man, ARTnews, Highsnobiety, The Art Newspaper, and numerous other publications. His newsletter, Public Service, is a catalog of fixations and essays.
Video by Pushpin Films / Paola Calvo for Artsy.
Thumbnail: Portrait of Paul Hutchinson by Paola Calvo for Artsy, 2025; Paul Hutchinson, from left to right: “Glare,” 2020, and “Schmetterlinge, pink and yellow,” 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Bremond Capela.
