Friday Focus: Dylan Hurwitz
Dylan Hurwitz received his MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University. Recent exhibitions include two-person exhibitions with Baby Blue Gallery, and Auxier Kline. He has been included in group shows in New York at Monya Rowe Gallery, Zürcher Gallery, Freight+Volume, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, National Arts Club, Danese Corey; as well as Samson Projects (Boston), Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Flatland Gallery (Houston), and Tapir Gallery (Berlin). Hurwitz has attended the Takt Residency (Berlin) and DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA). Hurwitz was Director of the Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance from 2015-2017, an arts organization dedicated to elevating the visibility of and providing resources to Boston-area LGBTQIA artists. Hurwitz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Can you tell me about your practice? How do you get started on a piece of work?
The search for connection and community as a queer person informs my paintings. I present moments of touch and intimacy, daily rituals of care and healing, and the queer outdoor and other gathering spaces that facilitate these experiences. I work from a combination of observation and memory. While much of my work deals with interior spaces, I have been driven to work more outdoors in public spaces after the isolation of the past few years of the pandemic. The landscapes start as plein air paintings- I work in oils on small canvases with a tabletop easel, sitting on the ground and working from my lap. The figurative works also have origins in quick observational drawings and painting sketches on-site. These are then referenced back in the studio for the larger works. The motif of the pathway repeats within the paintings, as well as a first person perspective often focusing on hands, with compositions that warmly invite the viewer into these moments and spaces, and which create an awareness of one’s body in relationship to the paintings.
Some of the places I spent time painting last year were Boy Beach in Provincetown, Riis Beach in New York, and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Boy Beach is a nudist and cruisey beach in Provincetown, which is fairly hidden and is accessed through a half hour hike through marshes and dunes. I spent time there the past few summers painting the pathways leading out to this space, as well as my friends. Riis Beach is a public city beach that has been a queer gathering place for decades, and I have spent time there in the summers since moving to New York in 2019. Prospect Park contains the only remaining old-growth forest in Brooklyn, and is also a cruising spot. Whether the focus is on figures or the landscape, I am interested in the daily rituals that we undertake to connect with ourselves and others, and the queer spaces in which this takes place.
Who or what are your biggest influences?
I grew up studying classical piano with the same instructor from Kindergarten through grade school. I think of the music that I grew up listening to and playing on the piano as important influences in my work: Debussy and Chopin, and Mussorgsky, and bands such as Joanna Newsom, Moses Sumney, Janelle Monae, Devendra Banhart, and Sufjan Stevens. There are aspects of what I experience when playing or listening to music that I seek when painting- the emotional catharsis and immediacy and movement; the way music appeals to the emotional and that which can’t be described in words; as well as the sociopolitical aspects of music.
My mother is a painter, and exposed me to the work of several artists who were formative- some of my earliest memories looking at art are from trips to France that my family took when I was in elementary school. I remember seeing Monet’s garden in Giverny, as well as his late water lilies at the Musée L’Orangerie. We also went to Saint-Paul Asylum where Van Gogh lived for a year and made a lot of work. So the Impressionists and Post-impressionists have been important, as well as regional impressionist movements such as in my hometown of New Hope, PA.
My work deals so much with my experiences as a queer person, and the work of queer painters like Hugh Steers and Patrick Angus has been really important to me, as well as the work of painters David Hockney, Lois Dodd, Arthur Dove, and Milton Avery, among others.
Emotional and spiritual healing through the sensory power of community is central to your work, can you talk further about that?
In addition to painting landscapes where queer people gather, I am interested in others spaces as well. I have a series about a festival I attended in Berlin a few years ago that was centered around creating a safe, healing space for queer men, with workshops that ranged from bodywork, mindfulness, sexuality, psychology, spirituality, gender, identity, ritual, performance, and social engagement. I think emotional and spiritual healing are not attended to nearly enough in our society- we aren’t given tools or time or resources. I think a festival such as the one I attended is a crucial place where the sensory experiences generated through everyone coming together created the space for emotional and spiritual healing. I am interested in exploring these things in my life, as well as in my work.
The materials I choose, and the ways I employ them are meant to emphasize moments of closeness, the porousness of the body, and the vulnerability of coming into contact with others- I oscillate between wet, fleshy mixtures of oil paint, to thick and sculptural paint application, where paint blends and blurs edges, as well as chalk pastel that dissolves into paint- blurring distinctions between self and other, body and landscape, abstraction and figuration.
The obvious answer would be my paints and brushes- but I have a keyboard in my studio, and it plays an important role. I love having it to play when I am stuck with a painting, or when I am procrastinating in the studio, or just need a break.
Finally, is there anything new coming up that you would like to tell us about?
I just finished a residency at the La Brea Studio Residency, and my solo show “How Close We Get”, just closed at the Cabin LA. I am happy to be back in the studio in New York working on next shows- next up is a group show I am excited about titled “Intimacy” at Galerie Fuchs, in Stuttgart today, January 13. After that is a show opening February 11 at the Green Family Art Foundation, which will be a curated overview of artists who have done the residency at the Cabin LA. Excited to announce more news soon!