Oil on board

96 x 122 cm. x 2 37 3/4 x 48 in. x 2

Signed in English and dated on the reverse
EXHIBITED
30 Oct – 22 Nov 2014, All Along the Shadows, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, USA

A Fond Dream Reoccurring at a Sudden Awakening
The debut of young British artist Maya Hewitt's representative work

“I don't plan out my paintings beforehand; I like to build up and construct a space and follow a narrative that evolves as I paint, as a way of finding my path within the works. I want to create a feeling of worlds within worlds in my paintings, where you can believe that you have the power inside of yourself to escape there.”
——Maya Hewitt

Born in the United Kingdom, Maya Hewitt comes from a mixed-race family. Her mother is from Philippine, and her father is a British economist. Maya has established her aspirations for art since childhood. After graduating from the University of Brighton and Camberwell College of Art successively, she went to the Nagoya University of the Arts in Japan for further studies and lived there for five years. The profound influence of Western culture and the experience from exploring the East have resulted in Maya's acute perception of foreign cultures, as well as her diversified approach, which exceeds her contemporaries. With experienced and sophisticated painting techniques, she translates the phenomena and emotional experience between matter and spirit, human beings and the universe, into an imaginary world on canvas. The perfect combination of oriental elements and western art history has contributed to her artistic vocabulary, which is distinctive and spontaneous, and gained her favor with international collectors from the UK, Japan, and Taiwan. In recent years, Maya returned to her hometown London to focus on creation while being active on the international art stage. She has held exhibitions in galleries and museums in London, Paris, Ireland, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Taipei, etc. In 2009 and 2014, she participated artist-in-residence programs respectively in Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan, and Luzhu Village, Taiwan. Her works have entered the prestigious collection of “me Collector Room” in Berlin.

Since 2010, Maya has stepped forward from the influence of Japanese animation culture, and extended her artistic language beyond the boundaries of multi-cultures. The painting, Days in the Wilderness, making its debut in the Asian market, is a representative of the artist's works at this stage. Completed with a distinctive vocabulary and excellent skills, the work stands out from the creations of Maya's peer young artists.

The return of original intention in the bustling void

In the work, Days in the Wilderness, Maya vividly depicts an absurd scene in the wilderness on a giant canvas of two meters. Under the gloomy sky at dusk, a mother and her son lean against each other, anxiously looking at the strange surroundings. On the right side, three “researchers” with dull eyes are working behind the workbench, whose serious expressions contrast with the disorderly objects around them. On the right side of the foreground, the elderly dressed in black looks steadily at the viewer with sharp eyes, attracting the viewer's attention to the astronautical images behind him and indicating the indifference and alienation brought about by the technological society. Differentiated from the scene composed of technological and futurist imagery, the artist set up a temporary “stage” with a breath of life on the left side: a woman in a blue dress is playing string music and surrounded by a group of female audience, while a man in suits on the left turns his back to the viewer, forming a strange visual correspondence with the elderly in black on the right side. With such an arrangement, the viewer's sight is directed in a cyclic manner. In this picture, Maya, who has been active in the international art scene, profoundly reveals the exchange and fusion of the East and West. By presenting the Eastern cultural elements from the perspective of Western art, she incorporates her understanding of the essence of life into the picture. Unlike most of the Western surrealist painters who address the theme of unconsciousness through a form with implication, Maya took up an approach with exquisiteness and elegance of Oriental literati art, which recalls the art of Frida Kahlo, to refine every detail with sincere life experience.

The variety of objects in the picture is peculiar to Maya's composition, resulting in an elaborate pictorial scene with a strong sense of reality. Many of the objects depicted come from the picture materials that the artist collected, while her interest is not in the photos on social media that portray life deliberately, but lies in the more intimate image of life. At the right side of the painting, the objects on the workbench are seemingly familiar but often forgotten in the corners of everyday memory, making the identity of the figures in the scene undistinguishable. With the displacement of visual familiarity and sensory vagueness, time seems standstill in the picture and the inner loneliness of the characters within is thus reflected. Though existing in a dream-like discrete space, the depicted figures arouse an emotional resonance in the viewer's heart. Through the overlap of fiction and reality, Maya guides the viewer to jointly explore the “traces of existence” of those forgotten lives, questioning modern technology and its standardized manipulation of individuals' “existential consciousness.”

Bearing various deep emotions, the painting by Maya transcends the latitude and separation of time and space, touching the lost souls loitering in the void with a sincere yet sophisticated spirit. The depicted figures incompatible with the environment and the absurd daily scenes in the suburbs reflect the artist's continuous thinking on “isolated body”. Breaking through the boundaries of space and time, body and soul, they lead the viewer out of the bustling labyrinth of reality and into the life journey of unremitting pursuit.

Price estimate:
HKD: 120,000 – 200,000
USD: 15,500 – 25,800

Auction Result:
HKD: 177,000