Enchanted Lands

Surrealistic maximalism thrives in these three artists’ paintings as awe-inspiring counterbalances to incomprehensible and terrifying daily narratives. Paintings by Jen Hitchings, Anna Ortiz, and Amy Lincoln find conversation in incandescent color palettes, playful symmetry, and puzzling optical effects in compositions that depict recognizable elements in wilderness scenes unpopulated by humans. But these artists borrow nature’s motifs for different purposes that are distinctly separate from nostalgic plein-air practices or regional documentation. Exhibited together, the paintings showcase wide-ranging politics in contemporary landscape painting, where imagination leaves sublime romanticism and pathetic fallacy behind in favor of highlighting moments when boundaries crumble between representation and abstraction.

Anna Ortiz builds compositions populated by totemic, omen-rich objects and places that collage her psychological journeys while sleuthing her Mexican-American heritage. Mesoamerican statuary, isolated vistas strewn with ruins and architectural detritus, and culturally symbolic botany—Nopál; Biznaga; Saguaro; Blue Agave— unpack and decolonize narratives of migration and estrangement in borderlands by bringing these objects, entities, and place names back into sacred space. Metaphysics in her paintings are evoked representationally, by depicting Aztec-powered mashups of volcanic eruptions, lunar eclipses, and pyramids for example, but also by Ortiz’s passion for monochromes that favors adjacent, limited color palettes that “slow time down, expand, and elongate” viewing attention reminiscent of geological and prehistoric time. Smooth, matte, low-contrast surfaces create a uniform, immersive viewing experience that “never lands in one spot,” as the artist says. Lines between recognizability and the unfamiliar are seductive in painting, just as they are dangerous when one straddles worlds as a bi-cultural person. Horizon lines in Ortiz’s paintings are “always moving, like rainbows.”

Jen Hitchings’ paintings are fictional composites of “invented places driven by human emotion and our relationship to the land.” Her landscapes are compositionally informed by mythic and mystic philosophies not to imbue her paintings with syncretic or idealized magic, but to “investigate how people live their lives.” Recognizable elements and views —a blossoming succulent; waterfalls cascading into lakes and rivers; sunset’s effects on trees—root the paintings in recognizability, but from here narrative implications clearly stop, instead emphasizing the slippery ways that human cognition and interpretations of place inform perception. Hitchings’ high-contrast, sharp-edged paintings study distance and physical space in relationship to the body and psyche. Parallels between human and inanimate natural forms embed biological and sexual features into her works, that are also designed using ratios, numerology, and fractional geometry after collaging photos she has taken to build crude sketches. She works with color sequentially as her bodies of work develop, embracing one color family per painting (ie “blue painting,” “brown painting.”) The effects are jarring, disorienting, and stark; her distorted lines oscillate all over her canvases, feathery as Charles Burchfield and curly as Leonora Carrington. Her paintings foreshadow urgency and import, as if epiphany lurks around every bend.

Amy Lincoln’s paintings are paradoxically earth-based and celestial, reflective and refractive. Each painting’s visual grammar is designed to create perceptual shifts that are as the artist says, “attuned by the long stare,” by challenging logic with illusion. Motifs are not spiritually-oriented, instead selected for their infinite ways to portray light and space—seascapes that study water and air; skyscapes that study clouds and sun. While her paintings’ optical effects are dense and richly layered, Lincoln restricts her subject matter to a minimal array that aims for “quieter, simpler, decluttered” interpretations of how ephemeral light can be. That said, her paintings are overtly unrealistic: light sources cast “false,” overly-luminous or totally-absent shadows; exaggerated perspective points and landscape features disrupt trustworthy visual filters. Lincoln says that “color and value relationships are imperative” to maintaining tensions between controlled and organic forms. She chooses three colors to mix per painting. Meticulously planned mockups shape orientation and color, while transparency and incandescence are achieved through layers of gradation that depicts “light moving across a surface.” 

Lincoln’s studies of light and color can be called transcendent only in the sense that they openly invite viewers to consider our own takes on immanence—how divinity might be expressed in our material world— but she does not make her paintings with this in mind. Hitchings and Ortiz, on the other hand, implant emblematic shapes and signs that trigger subconscious theater. Ortiz summons supernatural powers inherent to ancient histories, and Hitchings’ paintings explore occult platforms. All three artists depict moments of ineffability in ways that simultaneously freeze and release their experiences of change, something that landscapes excel at. Maybe instead of calling them visionary landscape painters, it would be more accurate to say that when Landscape is your mentor, demarcation lines between humans and our physical world are guaranteed to be ambiguous, transgressive, dwindling. 

Enchanted Lands opening at Johansson Projects; previews with Anna Ortiz in person on May 23, 1-6pm and an Opening Reception with Amy Lincoln in person on June 7, 5-8pm. 

Amy Lincoln (b. 1981, Bloomington, IN) lives and works in New York City. She completed her MFA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 2006 and her BA at University of California, Davis in 2003. Lincoln’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2022), Sperone Westwater (2021), Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York (2018; 2016) and Monya Rowe Gallery, Saint Augustine, FL (2016), among others. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at galleries including Johansson Projects (2024), The Hole (2022), Sargent’s Daughters (2018), Regina Rex (2017), as well as internationally at Galerie Valerie Bach, Brussels, Belgium (2020). Lincoln has been awarded residencies at the Wave Hill Winter Workspace program, the Inside Out Art Museum Residency in Beijing, and a Swing Space residency from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Anna Ortiz is a Mexican-American painter living in Brooklyn. Growing up in Worcester Massachusetts, Ortiz spent much of her childhood visiting her family in Guadalajara Mexico. There she studied art with her grandfather Alfonso who was a professional portrait painter as well as with her aunt Lolita, a professional sculptor. Ortiz’s surrealist landscapes reference the cultural divide she and so many second generation Americans feel. Their narrative nature references ancient Aztec and Mayan mythology while reflecting back on current and personal events. Out of the ruins of their previous existence, these new creatures inhabit a borderland between memory and imagination. Dualities define them; they give them shape. Weaving together invented spaces with references to actual places, the paintings take both a familiar tone and a sense of the uncanny. Ortiz has had solo exhibitions at Deanna Evans Projects, Dinner Gallery and Proto Gomez in New York. She has shown with Monya Rowe, Huxley-Parlour, My Pet Ram, and Johansson Projects Spring 2024. Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Make Magazine, Artsy and Art Maaze. She has also been interviewed on the Sound and Vision Podcast.

Jen Hitchings (b. 1988, New Jersey) received her BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College in 2011 and a certificate in Small Business & Entrepreneurship from CUNY Hunter College in 2018. She has attended residencies at Adventure Painting (Yellowstone National Park), DNA (Provincetown, MA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Studio Kura (Itoshima, Japan), and Highly Authorized (Ellenville, NY). Solo presentations of her work have taken place
at Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles, CA) in 2023, Taymour Grahne (London, UK) in 2023 and online in 2022, One River School (Englewood, NJ) in 2019, MEN Gallery (New York,
NY) and PROTO (Hoboken, NJ) in 2018, and Ideal Glass (New York, NY) in 2017 which was accompanied by a 16 x 30’ outdoor mural. In 2021, she completed two large-scale outdoor murals at The Wassaic Project, on view through 2023. In 2023, she was commissioned by Mailchimp to produce a 9 x 21’ indoor permanent office mural at their new headquarters in Atlanta, GA, along with 39 other contemporary painters. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at Richard Heller, Anat Ebgi, Good Mother (Los Angeles), Kutlesa (Goldau, Switzerland), Chen Projects at Louisa Art Center (Taipei, Taiwan), Taymour Grahne (London, UK), Ana Mas Projects (Barcelona, Spain), Gaa Gallery, Cindy Rucker, Pierogi (New York, NY), and The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) among others. She was a recipient of the Queens Council on the Arts’ New Works Grant in 2018. Between 2013–2020, Hitchings co-directed Transmitter and Associated Gallery in Brooklyn, NY and is the founder of artist-focused consulting agency Studio Associate. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Amy Lincoln’s large-scale seascapes and landscapes reference atmospheric elements—air, water, light, and clouds—and engage concepts of light reflection and refraction. Working in a more expansive format, Lincoln continues her exploration of the cosmos. Lincoln covers each of her wood panels with acrylic paint in gradations of colors from light to dark to develop a precise perspective and imply the illusion of space. The visual conceit of moving through a color spectrum references Ellsworth Kelly’s work, a nod to the minimal abstraction that has influenced her recent practice.

Inspired by the archeology of Mesoamerican figures and the landscape of Mexico, Anna Ortiz‘s work serves as a reflection on  Mexican-American identity. As the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, she grew up with one foot in the U.S. and the other in Mexico. Ortiz’s childhood was spent traveling to Mexico each summer to study painting with her grandfather, a professional portrait painter who painted portraits of the elites of Guadalajara. These trips also included studying with her aunt, a professional sculptor who recognized and encouraged her artistic inclinations since childhood. Her roots as an artist stem from her Mexican side and was encouraged at an early age to pursue the family legacy. Ortiz’s paintings reference statuary, botanicals and landscapes seen and visited during travels to Mexico. Her paintings are devotional offerings to an invented place of belonging. Out of the ruins of their previous existence, these new creatures inhabit a borderland between Mexico and the US. Their narrative nature references ancient Aztec and Mayan mythology while reflecting back on current and personal events. Dualities define them; they give them shape. Weaving together invented spaces with references to actual places, the paintings take both a familiar tone and a sense of the uncanny. Taken as a whole, the paintings offer a purview into an invented world existing just slightly out of the realm of possibility. By playing with spatial compression and a filtered palette, she invites viewers to consider the realities we create for ourselves and the possibilities that lie ahead.

Through symbolic imagery and psychedelic color, Jen Hitching‘s paintings depict the tenuous and historically mythological relationship between humankind and
nature. She investigates the psyche, erotic desire, time, and cosmic forces, referencing the visual languages of Japanese folk art, Hudson River School painting, and
spiritualist archetypes. Using subtle color transitions within a narrow range of hues, versions of cycles from the human and natural experience are rendered: lunar, solar, seasonal, menstrual, reproductive, atmospheric, and plant-life. The compositions convey oppositional, mirrored, or doubled elements, evoking
uncanny symmetry, optical distortion, and Rorschach tests. This combination results in fantastical scenes exuding specific seasons, times of day, temperatures, or moods. Referencing crude line sketches based loosely on places she’s visited between the American northeast and southwest, Hitching’s builds the compositions using strategic proportions and sacred geometries. Color is methodically applied, removed, thinly stained, or thickly painted in contoured waves–all by hand with no tape or tools–resulting in widely varied textures assigned to each element in the visual language she’s developed. The images include multiple versions of iconographies–celestial bodies, suns and moons, mountain ranges, oddly reflective deserts, and cloned river paths. Stars are often arranged in either Western Zodiac constellation patterns, or as letters or words in various languages. This decision channels her interest in linguistics, the evolution of communication, and the significance of signs and symbols in humankind’s endless desire to make meaning of our surroundings and existence. An admiration of and trust in nature to guide us is rekindled, and a delicate wavering between serenity and sorrow, isolation and unity emerges–two opposing forces meeting within a cycle.

Amy Lincoln

New York Time’s Arts Monthly Curator Insights | by Mark Taylor for SF/Arts
“Amy Lincoln’s acrylics depict repetitive cycles of waves crashing and clouds drifting across multi-hued skies. Time seems to pass inside each frame.” LINK

10 Contemporary Artists Painting Dreamlike, Fantastical Landscapes | by Samuel Anderson for Artsy, June 29, 2023 
“Amy Lincoln’s awe-inducing attention to color and gradient has made her a contemporary leader in both art and design.” LINK

Amy Lincoln: Radiant Spectrum | by Brian Martin for The Brookyln Rail
“The abstracted sun and moon, light waves, and water all create a symmetrical spectrum of color where the two glowing orbs emit waves in the shape of zig-zags and curves—the values get darker and darker until they meet in the middle as a deep purple.” LINK

How a New Generation of Women Painters Is Creating Dreamy Kaleidoscopic Works | February 26, 2023 by Julie Belcove for Robb Report
“The new seascapes and landscapes in Amy Lincoln’s cozy studio, a skylighted converted garage behind her house on a quiet street in Queens, N.Y., burst with blues and magentas so vibrant, yellows and reds so brilliant, they’d make fireworks jealous.” LINK

First Look: 6 Momentous Artists at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 | by Jacoba Urist for Cultured Mag, November 28, 2022
“There’s no substitute for actually standing before Amy Lincoln’s sublime colorform. Her imagined abstractions evoke a wondrous world of wavy, celestial horizons and groovy foliage.” LINK

Anna Ortiz

New York Time’s Arts Monthly Curator Insights | by Mark Taylor for SF/Arts
“Anna Ortiz’s large landscapes are rendered in intense monochrome recalling the hours just after sunset, plants and terrain still radiating energy as the light slowly fades.” LINK

Timeless Mesoamerican Desert Landscapes Glow in Anna Ortiz’s Vivid Paintings | by Kate Mothes for Colossal, June 10, 2024
“In a body of recent paintings now on view in the group exhibition Enchanted Lands at Johansson Projects, Ortiz profiles flora common in the Mexican desert. She outlines the orbs of golden barrel cacti or spiky fronds of century plants, placing us in a specific climate and tying each vivid composition to a continuum of timeless geological or celestial events.” LINK

Anna Ortiz | by Gabriel H. Sanchez for Art Forum
Ortiz, who was born to an American mother and a Mexican father, is keenly attuned to the space she occupies: It’s a zone between cultures that’s frequently affected by assimilation. Clearly, she’s looking for signs—not unlike what the migrating Aztecs were doing—that will eventually lead her home.” LINK

10 Contemporary Artists Painting Dreamlike, Fantastical Landscapes | by Samuel Anderson for Artsy, June 29, 2023
‘Isolated yet animated against the desert scrub, her botanical subjects evoke both longing and endurance. “I like to think of the plants as stand-ins for figures—creatures that can feel alone even when together in the desert,” Ortiz said. “That vulnerability lends itself to considering issues of resilience and compassion.”’

Interview with Anna Ortiz | by Andreana Donahue for Maake Magazine, 2023
“My influences include Aztec, Mayan, Zapotec gods and legends. I consider my personal history at the root of this work. As the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a dual citizen of both the US and Mexico, I’m interested in sharing my affection for Mexico with an American audience.” LINK

Jen Hitchings

New York Time’s Arts Monthly Curator Insights | by Mark Taylor for SF/Arts
“Nature jumps to brilliantly psychedelic life in Jen Hitchings’ mythological environments. Orange and pink tweak purple and yellow while the moon moves through its cycles. Lime green waters flow; a lone dragonfly acts as silent witness.” LINK

5 Artists on Our Radar in April 2023 | by Josie Thaddeus-Johans for Artsy, April 4, 2023
In Jen Hitchings’s paintings, the natural world becomes as mesmerizing as clockwork: mysterious, yet satisfyingly neat. With the imagination of sci-fi film posters and the precision of M.C. Escher prints, her landscapes in oil and acrylic conjure geometric, mystical worlds of swirling clouds and distant mountains.” LINK

The Artsy Advisory Notebook: April 2023 | by Meave Hamill April 6, 2023
“Hitchings’s otherworldly landscapes are distinct in their sci-fi aesthetic, combining cosmic imagery with bold, high-contrast colors and undulating patterns. I expect to see her name popping up on collectors’ wishlists in the coming months.” LINK

Meet Jen Hitchings | August, 8, 2022 by Shoutout LA
“The biggest inspiration and motivator however might be nature. Trees, funghi, birds, rivers, mountains, the moon – I have love affairs with them all.” LINK