Meg Hitchcock is a New York-based painter and writer. She is a 2024 Pollock Krasner Grant recipient and a 2023 Gottlieb Foundation Grant recipient. She received a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy. Her work with paint and text is an expression of her lifelong interest in religion, psychology, and literature. Hitchcock's work has been shown nationally and internationally and has been included in shows at MASS MoCA, Currier Museum of Art, CODA Museum (Netherlands), Virginia MOCA, and Crystal Bridges Museum, where she was included in State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Art in America, ArtCritical, The New Criterion, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, and Hyperallergic. Hitchcock is represented by galleries in New York and Charlottesville, VA.

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Artist Statement – Fang
In my three-dimensional paintings I explore pictorial space by extending architectural structures beyond the picture plane. The forms reach into the space of the viewer, inviting a more intimate engagement with the painting. I’m inspired by religious paintings of the Italian High Renaissance and Mannerist periods, in which the interaction of color and shifting light sources are as emotionally charged as the subject matter itself. I’m interested in what remains when overfamiliar devotional imagery – icons, shrines, crosses, mandalas – are emptied of their religious content and allowed to communicate through form and color alone. I borrow inverse perspective and other compositional devices from Byzantine and Sienese icon painting, with the aim of creating an emotional experience without the distraction of religious subject matter. My fascination with religious imagery is influenced by my evangelical upbringing, which, although I left the Christian faith decades ago, left me with a passion for its symbols and abstract language. My ongoing study of religions has exposed me to the iconography of many belief systems, all of which influence my work. 

In Fang, my solo show at the Hammond Museum, a large wall installation explores religious shrines as a site for focused self-awareness. Like the Buddhist deity Yamantaka, who bears his fangs to ward off self-delusion, my shrine, Fang, invites viewers to detach and be free from doctrines, dogmas, and personal dramas.

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