Michael Hecht
Studio 404
88 Hatch Street
New Bedford, MA
michaelwh@comcast.net


Michael Hecht is a figurative artist working in the various mediums of drawing, painting, and printmaking.

“Art is an illusion that brings into focus the perversity of reality”
- Donald Kuspit

My artwork is the material result of an inner necessity to document my temporal existence. This need stems from both curiosity and anguish. By exploring the psyche and embracing all of its contradictions and irrationalities, its desires and fears, I continuously re-assert a true sense of self. This sense of self would otherwise be suppressed by the imposed societal conditions of impotence, loneliness, and anonymity -- of being, essentially ‘lost in the crowd’.

Through the visceral means of art making I explore a multitude of dichotomies such as vitality/death, ecstasy/terror, human/bestial, light/darkness, laughter/tears, etc. Furthermore, I seek to intermesh an outer figural semblance of beauty and sensuality with a sense of inner elusive human spirit and transcendence. I continuously imbue varying aspects of eroticism, magic, and violence in my figures in order to convey a sense of the primordial. For, in these ‘enlightened’ times of advanced science and technology, I feel a desperate inclination to counter rational, impersonal, ‘sane’ thought with extreme, intimate, compulsive emotion.

My intention is to ultimately communicate, through the hallucinatory means of my images, some of the majestic and sacred aspects of human existence. As an end result, I can only hope that the disparate observer of my work will be reminded of his/her individual passion, vitality, and freedom, if only momentarily.