The Land before me | ERICA MAO | KYLE HITTMEIER | HE TIAN

March 10th, 2022 - April 14th, 2022

Crossing Art is pleased to present The Land Before Me, the group exhibition featuring three emerging contemporary artists from the United States and China: Kyle Hittmeier, Erica Mao and He Tian. This collaborative presentation continues Crossing Art’s mission of cultivating and supporting artists within a global context, offering a platform to highlight the compelling visual achievements of a new younger generation of artists today, and bridging the non-spoken conversation between different regions of the world. Through the unique and signature styles, these artists all possess a dynamic approach to painting that compounds abstraction, realism and expressionistic qualities through still life and landscape. The exhibition will be on view at Crossing Art gallery in Chelsea, New York from March 10, 2022 – April 14, 2022, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 10 from 7 – 9 pm.

The series by He Tian included in the exhibition displays the artist’s signature aesthetic of green and golden tones. In his works, the artist depicts natural scenery that is easy to be forgotten but has tenacious vitality, guiding his audience to enter a state of meditation and tranquility within the fast-paced world. The lush grass grows recklessly, from a small clump to boundless —— his paintings hint at this objective observation and personal consciousness, retaining his approach to build on a dialogue between human nature and rationality that co-exist in nature. All things originate out of the combinations of causes and conditions, thus they cannot be regarded as original existence; at the same time, they arise, change, and demise upon certain conditions, so they cannot be said as non-existence. Like his admiration for classicism, his longing for nature is also expressed by using classical painting techniques to strive for exquisiteness and advocate respect for details. The artist tries to intensify the psychological tension in the construction of the picture. Painting grass here not only exists as a metaphor that condenses the meaning of the painting itself, but also simulates the psychological state generated by the uncertainty and tension in the relationship between life and daily life.

Kyle Hittmeier’s approach to making art is varied, united almost entirely by its stylistic unpredictability. Ranging from painting to digital media, recent work continues to explore perceptual shifts and thematic rupture. Kyle’s oeuvre conveys a profound connection between the physical application of brushstrokes and the interior world of his emotions, exuding an existential yet poetic exploration that invites us to question the truthness of visual perception. The established softness in the background is what allows his painted sticky notes to jump off the canvas, as their sharp lines crinkle and fold with a realism that directly contrasts the ethereal softness of his cotton-candy sky. The stickies cast their own dark shadows onto the sky, as if a light - the sun, perhaps? - stood directly above them. This unseen light illuminates the markings on the notes, an arrangement of lines reminiscent of those kindergarten days where, crayon in hand, you’d place a paper over a large enough leaf and make a rubbing out of it, revealing nature’s patterns. Hittmeier craftingly mimics a three-dimensional scene, with the sticking notes onto the sky and blending together the dawn and the dusk, that illustrate the artist’s own interpretation of surrealism, leaving the audience's mind to wonder why and how. The works in this exhibition invites you to sit and stay a while - whether that be to discover Hittmeier’s skillful secrets, or simply to bask in the peace that emanates from the work. 

There is an internal tension between reason and chaos in the work of Erica Mao, which as with the other artists in the exhibition, conveys an alternative, dreamlike state. Mao similarly avoids formal or factual coherence, instead using opposing tones and visual non-sequiturs across a single body of work. She draws inspiration from the hidden aspects of her childhood home, such as lush forests, twisting creeks, and wetlands that snake their way through the cookie-cutter suburbs of Maryland where she grew up. These natural features appear in her landscapes and frequently serve as an obstacle or a vehicle for the protagonists.  Mao depicts pseudo-biblical compositions of desolate, forested scenes smoldering with fire or leveled by flood in a series of visceral, atmospheric paintings. Her landscapes are filled with enigmatic figures embarking on epic journeys in search of safety and the houses are dwellings that serve as shelter in the inhospitable world the protagonists wander in. The hallucinatory atmosphere with a depraved surface tension might be inspired by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet suburban town and its veneer of unease. We are all the protagonists in her paintings, wandering through, moving acrossing, searching for a place of spiritual revelation and a getaway from somewhere.