Focusing on still lifes, interiors, and landscapes, Californian painter Hilary Pecis weaves a rich tapestry of glowing colors and subtle ornaments from her explorations of personal surroundings. Coffee tables full of books, park vistas, storefronts, or leftovers from a meal are the subjects for compositions bursting with chromatic harmonies and intricate detail. We find color delicacies worthy of Matisse and daring juxtapositions of hues like in expressionist painting, and yet these are utterly contemporary works, inviting, approachable, inspirational. The catalog documents Pecis’s first institutional solo exhibition in China at the TAG Art Museum in Qingdao, featuring a rich selection of more than twenty works created between 2018 and 2023 with telling close-ups and notes on the specifics of the paintings.

MELODY OF SENSATIONS
(excerpt from the essay by Leo Li Chen)

Genres and styles in the history of art have been deeply engrained in our collective visual consciousness, and have thus become an important impetus in contemporary consumerist culture and production. Pecis’s paintings cleverly capture the loosening of the boundaries between individual privacy and public living. Perhaps the private and the public have long been indistinguishable, but here they are interchangeable in a fluid or symbiotic relationship.

With subjectivity and sensuality, Pecis extracts her still lifes and landscapes from her daily surroundings. The prototypes for her interiors mainly come from her own house or the residences of her friends. Sitting rooms, dining tables, books, sofas, wallflowers, pets, and florals—they are the personal space or possessions of an individual, but also experiences that can be universally replicated, a modern “norm.” Thus, when we see a scene devoid of actual people, it brings up the paradoxes of belonging, identity, and individual existence: like expressions and postures, the possessions and spaces of human beings manifest as character aspects of their owners. Of course, they do not convey the complete existence of these owners, but rather they are mostly a performance for others. In Pecis’s works, these objects and belongings harboring individual emotions serve to construct, through flattened spatiality, a “portrait” of absent people, an open “portrait” inviting the external gaze.

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In Zusammenarbeit mit Cornerstone Art Ltd