Jen Hitchings
Bio
Jen Hitchings
Jen Hitchings (1988, New Jersey) received her BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College in 2011 and a certificate in Small Business & Entrepreneurship from CUNY Hunter College in 2018. She has attended residencies at Colstoun (Haddington, Scotland), Adventure Painting (Yellowstone National Park), DNA (Provincetown, MA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and Studio Kura (Itoshima, Japan). Solo presentations of her work have taken place at Gaa Gallery (NYC) in 2024, Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles, CA) and Taymour Grahne (London, UK) in 2023, One River School (Englewood, NJ) in 2019, MEN Gallery (New York, NY) and PROTO (Hoboken, NJ) in 2018. In 2021, she completed two large-scale outdoor murals at The Wassaic Project in New York, and was commissioned by Mailchimp to produce a 9 x 21’ indoor permanent office mural at their headquarters in Atlanta, GA in 2023. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA), Artemin and Chen Projects (Taipei, Taiwan), Richard Heller, Anat Ebgi, and Good Mother (Los Angeles), Kutlesa (Goldau, Switzerland), Taymour Grahne (London, UK), Gaa Gallery, Cindy Rucker, Pierogi (New York, NY), and The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) among others. She was a recipient of the Queens Council on the Arts’ New Works Grant in 2018. Between 2013–2020, Hitchings co-directed Transmitter and Associated Gallery in Brooklyn, NY and is the founder of artist-focused consulting agency Studio Associate. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Pieces
Number of ritems found:
7
Artist's Statement
Through symbolic imagery and surreal color, my work reflects upon the historically mystical and mythological relationship between humankind and nature. Recurring subjects such as suns, moons, mountain ranges, waterfalls, mirages, and rivers all reference corporeal and natural cycles: lunar, solar, seasonal, menstrual, reproductive, atmospheric, and botanical. Informed by the visual histories of Japanese ukiyo-e, Hudson River School painting, and spiritualist archetypes, I explore oppositional forces, imbuing the work with omens centered around the animus, erotic desire, and time. Otherworldly color is methodically applied, removed, thinly stained, or impastoed in contoured waves–all by hand with no tape or tools–in highly considered palettes denoting time of day, temperature, mood, or seasonality. Attention to surface and materiality of the paint adds to the coded symbology employed within each painting. Some scenes are entirely imagined, sketched to illustrate relationships and emotions between myself and others, while others are inspired by places I’ve had significant experiences at. Teetering between fact and fiction, my work highlights the friction between an inherent trust in nature as a guide and humankind’s belief in signs and symbols to extract meaning and purpose from the everyday. This duality depicts a delicate wavering between serenity and sorrow, isolation and interdependence.