Eric Hibit “Prism in the Window”

Morgan Lehman Gallery

This event has ended.

The artist explains that “being gay means celebrating my way of looking at the world and rendering it with all the care, love, perversity, splendor, and joy that I can muster. My paintings are an expression of this drive.” Hibit assigns symbolic (and often slyly suggestive) meaning to his subjects, which include pincushions, beach balls, flowers, and fruit bowls. In this way, the artist playfully engages with the legacy of representational painting and the still life genre, imbuing it with a uniquely queer perspective.

Hibit is also a zealous formalist. Deploying an array of studio techniques and an unabashedly over-the-top formal sensibility, Hibit’s work presents a dazzling interplay of surfaces, textures, colors, and patterns. Looking at Hibit’s paintings is akin to the visual experience one might encounter in the exhibition’s eponymous painting, where a dangling glass prism slowly rotates on its axis, projecting rays of colored light in myriad directions, illuminating surfaces and planes. In his work, the artist aims to create a color overload that overwhelms and excites our eyes and presents a challenge to conventional taste. Up close, methodically applied pinpoints of paint draw viewers closer, asking us to consider each work as both image and as a delicately, lovingly crafted object.

With “Prism in the Window”, Hibit creates a visual world that is both subversive and exuberantly welcoming. Hibit’s experience of growing up gay in the homophobic culture of mainstream America in the early years of the AIDS pandemic led him to identify with “the outsider”, inspiring his work as an art teacher for individuals with mental illness. This milieu informed the artist’s creative ethos, which sees the potential for imagery and pictorial language to heal, soothe, inspire, awaken and empower.

Eric Hibit is a visual artist based in New York City. Born in Rochester, NY, Hibit attended the Corcoran College of Art + Design (BFA,1998) and Yale University School of Art (MFA, 2003). In New York, he has exhibited at Max Protetch Gallery, Anna Kustera Gallery, C24 Gallery, Zurcher Studio, Field Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Ortega y Gasset Projects, and Morgan Lehman Gallery, among others. He has exhibited nationally at Adds Donna in Chicago, Curator’s Office in Washington, DC, Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA, The Cape Cod Museum of Art, Satellite Contemporary in Las Vegas, NV, The University of Vermont, Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA and internationally in France and Norway. His work has been covered by the Washington Post, The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Newsweek, New York Times and New York Post. Hibit has taught studio art at Tyler School of Art, Hunter College, NYU, The Cooper Union, Suffolk County Community College and The 92nd Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association. Artist residencies include Terra Foundation in Giverny, France (2003), UNILEVER Residency in New York (2015), and Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts (2019) and Green Olives Arts in Tetouan, Morocco (2019). Publications include Dear Hollywood Writers, with poet Geoffrey Young (Suzy Solidor Editions, 2017) and Paintings and Fables with Wayne Koestenbaum, a limited edition artist’s book (2017). He is currently Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery based in Brooklyn, where he has curated three group exhibitions since 2014.