Eric Hibit: The constant gardener 

Contributed by Zach Seeger / Dennis Congdon, whose paintings depict acrid colored heaps of art garbage, once told me, “I tend to appreciate painters who work economically with what they’re given from their surroundings. You know, like my grandmother, who lived on a farm, and would whip up a meal with practically nothing in the fridge.” I too was raised to appreciate this beauty-through-austerity approach, and in light of tariffs and stagnating sales, painting with economy and valuing actual pigment may not just be in fashion but necessary. “The Big Seed,” Eric Hibit’s painting show at Morgan Lehman, is a tribute to physical pigment and the conservationist spirit, and a showcase for acute observational detail and the sheer joy of painting. 

Hibit’s dab/dot style is a distinctive signature, accenting dazzling ornamentation and ‘80s rainbow art with the precision of Wu Daozi. Peter Halley-esque color language is certainly an antecedent, but Hibit adds a blazing optimism manifested in earthly toil and studded sexuality He paints mostly flowers and mushrooms. Ambitious in scale and embodying both order and abundance, his mostly landscape-oriented canvases incorporate clumps and crisp edges as well as dots and dabs to render leaves, petals, caps, earth, planes and buzzing insects while drawing us into their surfaces. 

He recycles paint skins from palettes, creating new means of grafting novel marks onto canvas. Hibit’s pointillist blobs have a cumulative acrylic structure, one layer of paint building on previous layers. Thus, they are hardly inert and conjure not passive visual features but rather organic botanical forms. At the same time, while painters like Christian Schumann use such devices to render worlds within worlds to jar viewers into scale shifts, Hibit’s gaze stops at the macro level of the paint itself. Such restraint calls for an eye that is at once disciplined and opportunistic. The flowers, plants, soil, beetles, passing planes, and plastic bags faithfully reflect the observations of a constant gardener, tending to his plants – or his canvas – while taking in the world around him. 

“Eric Hibit: The Big Seed,” Morgan Lehman. 526 West 26th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY. Through June 28, 2025.

About the author: Zach Seeger is a painter working in LIC and upstate New York.