Untitled (Braid) | Graphite, Oil on Found Surfaces | 9 5/8" x 12 1/2" | 2014
Untitled (Back) | Graphite, Oil on found surfaces | 9 1/2" x 13 1/8" | 2014
Artist Statement: These diptychs are part of a body of work exploring themes of anonymity, intimacy, and the relation of these ideas to the spiritual. In bringing together representational drawings of anonymous persons with nonobjective abstractions, I am in fact alluding to a third element, invisible but universally felt: a human search for the mystic, the transcendent, or divine that is both consuming and inconclusive. I work on the interiors of excised book covers as a means of bringing a viewer closer, to a distance normally reserved for reading. Additionally, the seam that runs down the center of each piece communicates the “openness” of the work, but also suggests that it could be closed.
Brian Hitselberger (b. 1982) is an artist living and working in Athens, Georgia. His installations, paintings and works on paper explore a variety of themes that shift between subjects and perspectives alternately intimate and immense—occasionally within the same piece. Often working in series, his modestly-scaled paintings and drawings employ detailed mark-making, dense layering and unexpected relationships between form, content and material, yielding works that that strive for optimism without simplicity, and wonder without resolution. His work has exhibited throughout the Southeast, and abroad in South Africa and Israel. He has held residencies at the Elsewhere Artists Collaborative, the HUB-BUB Arts Initiative, and the Hambidge Center for the Arts. He received a BFA in Printmaking from Tulane University in 2005, and an MFA in Painting from the University of Georgia in 2010. He is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking in the Art Department of Piedmont College. More of his work can be found at brianhitselberger.com.