Hilary Pecis
I think of painting as an endurance activity, a series of small movements that add up to a finished piece.
Hilary Pecis was born in Fullerton, California in 1979 and she lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her BFA in 2006 and her MFA in 2009 from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.
Pecis made conceptually-driven abstract collages during school, but she shifted her focus to figurative paintings after her move to Los Angeles. “One thing that really stuck out to me is just the way things slowed down,” the artist said in a 2021 interview with Taylor Dafoe for Artnet. “I was staying in my house and then making paintings from it. It was really liberating to not feel like I needed to defend anything. When you don’t have all these expectations—it’s very freeing.” Pecis is now known for her cheerful still-life and landscape paintings. Her expressive palette references Fauvism in its intensity and vividness. Her canvases are infused with a jubilant energy that is palpable, and it is impossible not to feel joyful when seeing her work. The finished paintings are so vibrant that they are often described as “sun-drenched.”
Pecis’ process begins by taking photos of the interiors of her own as well as of her friends’, the streets of Los Angeles, and other places she has visited. She uses the photo to translate a rough outline of the imagery onto a canvas, then paints large swaths of saturated color before adding details. She paints deliberately; her gestural and textured mark-making draws the viewer’s eyes on a path through the painting. Pecis describes herself as a tentative painter, revisiting or adjusting the composition many times until she feels the painting is finished. She often moves from one painting to another whenever she feels stuck.
Pecis’s still-life paintings rarely, if ever, include entire human figures, though there may be the occasional body part. “I feel the same way about photographs of myself that I do about painting a person,” she explained in the Artnet interview. “When I see a photo of myself, I just don’t think it sums up who I am. It’s just a flattening out of a person.” Each painting could be a portrait of a person. The crowded tables, floral arrangements, and pets are a more accurate reflection of who a person is than their bodies. Pecis often includes paintings by artists she admires or a book by a favorite author in her still-lifes.
In her landscape paintings, Pecis tries to capture the sights she encounters on her daily runs. The reference photos she takes don’t necessarily match the colors as she remembers them. Her memories are “so much more vibrant than in my photo,” she said in a Galerie article covering her 2023 solo show at David Kordansky Gallery. She added that composing her nature scenes “was really exciting… and also the most challenging.” Pecis’ landscapes contain more organic brushstrokes than her still-lifes do as her focus is on “connecting natural movements of the sun to shadow and reflection.”
Pecis has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at TAG Art Museum, Qingdao, China (2023); Gagosian, Athens (2023); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2022); Rockefeller Center, New York (2021); Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2021); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, New York (2021); SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2020); and Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Flagler College, St Augustine, Florida (2019). Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Palm Springs Art Museum, California; the Orange County Museum of Art, California; the Columbus Art Museum, Ohio; the Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; the Daegu Art Museum, South Korea; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Aurora Museum, Shanghai; the Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; and the Deji Art Museum, Nanjing. Pecis was the recipient of the 2008 San Francisco Arts Commission’s Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship. She co-founded Binder of Women in 2017, a Los Angeles-based collective of female-identifying artists.
Hilary Pecis is represented by the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, California; the Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, New York; the Spurs Gallery in Chaoyang, Beijing; and the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London, England.
