The artist explains that “being gay means celebrating my way of looking at the world and rendering it with all the care, love, perversity, splendor, and joy that I can muster. My paintings are an expression of this drive.” Hibit assigns symbolic (and often slyly suggestive) meaning to his subjects, which include pincushions, beach balls, flowers, and fruit bowls. In this way, the artist playfully engages with the legacy of representational painting and the still life genre, imbuing it with a uniquely queer perspective.

Hibit is also a zealous formalist. Deploying an array of studio techniques and an unabashedly over-thetop formal sensibility, Hibit’s work presents a dazzling interplay of surfaces, textures, colors, and patterns. Looking at Hibit’s paintings is akin to the visual experience one might encounter in the exhibition’s eponymous painting, where a dangling glass prism slowly rotates on its axis, projecting rays of colored light in myriad directions, illuminating surfaces and planes. In his work, the artist aims to create a color overload that overwhelms and excites our eyes and presents a challenge to conventional taste. Up close, methodically applied pinpoints of paint draw viewers closer, asking us to consider each work as both image and as a delicately, lovingly crafted object.

With “Prism in the Window”, Hibit creates a visual world that is both subversive and exuberantly welcoming. Hibit’s experience of growing up gay in the homophobic culture of mainstream America in the early years of the AIDS pandemic led him to identify with “the outsider”, inspiring his work as an art teacher for individuals with mental illness. This milieu informed the artist’s creative ethos, which sees the potential for imagery and pictorial language to heal, soothe, inspire, awaken and empower.