About
Artist's Statement
I am an artist with 50+ years experience. My work explores images and language as a contested territory. Spaces where power, belief, and identity are negotiated through repetition, distortion, and performance. I’m interested in the ways propaganda, doublespeak, and media systems reshape thought until meaning collapses. By treating text and images as both material and arena, I create visual-poetic structures where competing ideologies collide on the same surface. The page becomes a battleground: not for persuasion, but for exposure.
Formally, I work at the crossroads of analog and digital processes. I begin with algorithmic / chance-based image accumulation. I then capture and adjust the image digitally, and return it to the analog through physical labor by carving, printing or painting. Based on the image created, I generate short companion poems and stories. This analog–digital–analog loop is essential to the work. It mirrors the feedback cycles of modern media while reasserting the body’s role in making. Imperfection, decay, and misalignment are not errors; they are evidence. They register resistance against smooth systems and controlled narratives.
Conceptually, the work draws from DADA, concrete poetry, photography, and relief print traditions and rooted in the present: in an era where truth is styled, outsourced, and consumed. I’m not interested in offering answers. I’m interested in creating conditions where visual art and written language betray themselves in an arena where the viewer / reader feels the tension between what is said and what is seen. A world where words and images refuse to behave politely.
Biography
Philip Hurtig
Born, 1957
Location of Birth: San Jose, CA, USA
Residing and working in Burlington, WA, USA
Philip Hurtig’s path to art began with a simple desire to draw. It wasn’t a grand ambition, just something that felt natural. Growing up in Silicon Valley, surrounded by technology and innovation, he was more interested in images than in circuits.
He studied painting and printmaking at San Jose State University, where he learned from Fletcher Benton and Kenneth Auvil. Later, his time in Monterey deepened his connection to photography, adding another dimension to his approach.
Hurtig’s work blends halftone textures with elements of magical realism and DADA, creating high-contrast compositions that exist between reality and illusion. His influences range from Dada and Surrealism to 15th and 16th-century Northern European relief printmaking. Artists like Giorgio de Chirico, Gustave Doré, Odilon Redon, and Francisco Goya have shaped his vision.
In addition to his visual art, Hurtig writes short fiction and poetry in a blended style of DADA, magical realism, minimalism and surrealism. His stories and poems, much like his paintings and prints, exist in a space where the familiar becomes strange, and reality is never quite stable. Through both words and images, he explores thought, identity, violence and survival. Hurtig invites the viewer / reader into worlds where meaning can distort and collapse and perception is always shifting.