Hijack: Crescendo | Contessa Gallery, Southampton NY

Contessa Gallery to Present Hijack: Crescendoendo in Southampton, the Los Angeles Painter's First Hamptons Solo Exhibition

The artist will attend a champagne reception on Saturday, August 15, from 6 to 8 PM at 9 Main Street. In December the gallery placed the highest-priced work of his career at Art Miami during Miami Art Week.

SOUTHAMPTON, NY - Contessa Gallery will present Hijack: Crescendo, the first Hamptons solo exhibition by the Los Angeles painter Hijack, opening Saturday, August 15 at the gallery's Southampton location at 9 Main Street. A champagne reception with the artist will be held that evening from 6 to 8 PM, and the exhibition will remain on view through the season.

Hijack paints on marble, on salvaged wood panels, on canvas and on reclaimed metal street signage, moving between surfaces that each demand a different hand and holding the same command of the image across all of them. Several of the largest paintings join two separate scenes into a single image. In Same Wavelength, a skier on one side and a surfer on the other share the same sweeping line, so that a slope of snow and the crest of a wave become one continuous form. Blind Date is built the same way. Each figure is caught at the moment of commitment, and the two halves read as one picture before the viewer registers that they are two.

When the street artists who came before him moved indoors, most kept working in spray paint and stencil, so the gallery pieces looked like the walls they came from. Hijack works in oil, and paints with the patience of a realist. For the works in this exhibition, his subjects are drawn from the leisure world the Hamptons knows well: surfers, golfers, kayakers, skiers, horses and riders.

In other works, Hijack lifts figures from the masterpieces of art history and places them in the present day. In Within Reach, Van Gogh leans out of a tenement window on one panel and hands his Sunflowers across the open space to a woman reaching from a window on the other, the gap between the two canvases becoming the distance the painting has to travel. The Mona Lisa turns up at the wheel of a speedboat. In Match Pointillism, the crowd in the stands is drawn from Monet, a nineteenth-century audience seated at a contemporary match. Hijack is not quoting these paintings or parodying them. He is moving their subjects forward in time, so !gures painted more than a century ago arrive in a world they were never painted into.

Born in 1992, Hijack came of age with a spray can in hand and was working the walls of Los Angeles as a teenager. He has exhibited internationally for more than a decade, and his work is held in private collections across the United States and abroad. In December, Contessa Gallery placed the highest-priced work of his career at Art Miami during Miami Art Week. He lives and works in Los Angeles. The exhibition runs through the season.