HILARY PECIS

Hilary Pecis (b. 1979, Fullerton, CA) earned a BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include The Crisp-Ellert Museum, St. Augustine, FL; Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA; among others. Pecis has participated in numerous group exhibitions, at venues such as Brand Library & Arts Center, Glendale, CA; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; University of Texas, San Antonio, TX; Dominican University of San Rafael, San Rafael, CA; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA; and a forthcoming exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth at Jack Shainman Gallery - The School, Kinderhook, NY; among others. The artist's work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New Yorker, and CARLA. Pecis was the 2008 recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship and is a co-founder of Binder of Women, a collective of female artists based in the Los Angeles area. Pecis lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

HILARY PECIS b. 1979, Fullerton, CA Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA EDUCATION 2009 MFA, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA 2006 BFA, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2020 Come Along With Me, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (forthcoming)

The Space In Between, Crisp Ellert Art Museum, Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL 2019 Adios Verano, Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY

From a Place in the Light, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA2018 Familiar View, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA

On View, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY 2017 Desert Paintings, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY

New Works, Josh Liner Gallery, New York, NY 2016 El Verano, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2014 Crash, Parklife Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2012 In Accordance, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Consensus, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2011 Reconfigure, Bows and Arrows, Sacramento, CA

Hilary Pecis, Galleria Glance, Turin, Italy Half Truths and Outright Lies, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2009 Intricacies of Phantom Content, Triple Base Gallery, San Francisco, CA From the Paradigm Shift, Receiver Gallery, San Francisco, CA

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 FEEDBACK, curated by Helen Molesworth, Jack Shainman Gallery | The School,

Kinderhook, NY (forthcoming) 2019 I <3 Paint, curated by Kim Dorland, Patel Gallery, Toronto, CA 2018 California Love, Gallery Droste, Wuppertal, DE

Care and Feeding, The Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA Glade Hits, Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY How They Ran, Over the Influence, Los Angeles, CA Sun Gazers, The Pit, Glendale, CAThe Vanity of Earthy Achievements, Orth Contemporary, Tulsa, OK Coffee for Eight, Pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA Binder of Women, 0.0 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Vision Valley, Glendale Biennial, curated by The Pit, Brand Library and Art Center, Glendale, CA Art Is Where the Heart Is Vol. 2, curated by Galerie Drost, Galerie LJ, Paris, FR Ten Year Anniversary, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY

2017 Does it Make a Sound? Ochi Gallery, Ketchum, ID SUMMER BREAKS, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY Fake News, CES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA LA Intersections, Fabien Castanier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY

2016 How High, Left Field Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA Southland, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Major Works, Chandra Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2015 That’s My Trip, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY Jug Life, Parklife, San Francisco, CA Works on Paper, Hunted Projects, Tilburg, Netherlands Pattern///Chaos, Cinders, Brooklyn, NY 649 Irving, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA Chinatown Presents, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2014 Ghost Current, curated by Ryan Wallace, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark Ducks, curated by Ryan Travis Christian, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2012 End of Days, Mixed Greens Gallery, New York, NY 2011 The Eagle, Bull, and Bear, Little Paper Planes, San Francisco, CA

Slash, CES Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA Elisabeth Bernstein, Daniel Gordon, & Hilary Pecis, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY Domestic Goods, curated by Ryan Wallace, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NYThe Lab, San Francisco, CA

2010 Default State Network, curated by Ryan Wallace, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY Boom!, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA Ah, Wilderness!, Ebersmoore, Chicago, IL The Power of Selection: Part 3, curated by Ryan Travis Christian, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL Shadow Shop, Project by Stephanie Sujuko, SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA Juried BAC, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA Hello Sweden, Krets Gallery, Malmo, Sweden Temple of Bloom, Cinders Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Album, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, Inaugural Show, Guerrero Gallery, San Francicso, CAFax, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA

2009 Galleri Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm, Sweden Infinity, curated by Andrew Schoultz, Scion Installation, Los Angeles, CA This is Your, This is My, University of Texas, San Antonio, TX Control C, Control V, EbersB9 Gallery, Chicago, IL Super Fine, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY Remix, Catherine Clark, San Francisco, CA Sports, Synchronicity, Los Angeles, CA

2008 Bobby Hutton, Luggage Store, San Francisco, CA Allegory of the Mountain, Mahan Gallery, Columbus, OH Immediate Future: The Murphy & Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts, SF Arts New Landscapes, Dominican University of San Rafael, San Rafael, CA Spaced Out, Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA Gold Rush, Okay Mountain, Austin, TX

2007 Grounded, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CADomestic, Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles, CA Albedo, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco, CA Weathered Worlds, Park Life Gallery, San Francisco, CA Cut and Paste, Tag Art Gallery, Nashville, TN

2006 The Marfa Salon, Marfa, TX West Coast Windows, Samson Projects, Boston, MA

2005 Lilac Ladies Mural Project, The Lab, San Francisco, CA

RESIDENCIES & AWARDS 2011 Heroes and Hearts, San Francisco General Hospital 2009 Aurobora Press Residency 2008 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship, SF Arts Commission

Masterminds Grant, San Francisco Weekly 2006 Emerge Recipient, GenArts SF 2005 Best of the Junior Review, California College of the Arts

Robert Ralls Scholarship, California College of the Arts

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2019 Purvey, Lee. “Snap Review,” CARLA, May 22, 2019.

Gerlis, Melanie. “Collecting,” Financial Times, January 25, 2019.2018 Smith, Tasmin and Matt Gonzalez. “Hilary Pecis’ ‘Familiar View’ In San Francisco,”

Juxtapoz Magazine, October 25, 2018.Russeth, Andrew. “Critic’s Diary,” Art News, September 12, 2018.Fateman, Johana. “Curtis Talwst Santiago and Hilary Pecis at Rachel Uffner,” The New Yorker, June 25, 2018 Robinson, Leanna. “Vision Valley, An Effortless Cool Factor,” The Artillery, May 10, 2018.

2017 Peffier, Prudence, “Hilary Pecis at Joshua Liner,” Artforum, Summer 2017 Horst, Aaron, “Fake News at CES Gallery,” Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA), May 19, 2017 “Fake News,” Wall Street International, May 11, 2017 “Hilary Pecis at Joshua Liner Gallery,” Blouin Art Info, New York, April 21, 2017

2016 Hotchkiss, Sarah. “Artful Dodger: Jump Joyfully into July Art Happenings,” KQED, June 30, 2016 Chun, Kimberly, “From SF to LA, Hilary Pecis Finds Her Place in the Sun,” SF Gate, June 28, 2016

2012 Goergen, Stacy, “Collage and Effect,” Hampton Magazine, p154-156, June 29, 2012 Cuffe, Michael, “Erin M. Riley and Hilary Pecis Interview About Their New Bodies of Work at Guerrero Gallery,” Warholian, April 2012 Russo, Rebecca, “Il Metodo VideoInsight,” Postmedia Books, 2012

2011 O’Toole, Meighan, “Fish Bowl,” Foam Magazine, pg. 35, September 2011 McManus, Austin. “Hilary Pecis,” Juxtapoz Magazine, p.52-65 &140-141, May, 2011 Riba, Stefano, “Mezze Verita e Autentiche Menzogne”, ArtTribune, April, 2011 Louise Turner, Cherie, “SF Galleries: Collages of Calculated Chaos,” Huffington Post, Feb 25, 2011 Harman, Ken, “An Interview with Hilary Pecis,” Hi Fructose, Feb. 16, 2011 Andrews, Bryan, “Omega and Half Truths & Outright Lies,” Art Practical, Feb. 12, 2011

2010 Farr, Kristin, “Guerrero Gallery Opening,” KQED.org:Arts, March 18, 2010 2009 Gavin, Francesca, “Hilary Pecis,” Dazed and Confused Magazine, Issue 179, Oct., 2009

Broder Van Dyke, Michelle, “What You Are, I Once Was,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 29, 2009 Louise Turner, Chérie, “Hilary Pecis: Intricacies of Phantom Content at Triple Base Gallery,” Art Ltd., September, 2009 Vogel, Traci, “Hilary Pecis: Intricacies of Phantom Content,” SF Weekly, July 13, 2009 Sussman, Matt, “Intricacies of Phantom Content,” SF Bay Guardian, June 24, 2009 Sussman, Matt, “Hilary Pecis and Elyse Mallouk,” Flavorpill, June 19, 2009 Chun, Kimberly, “Hard-Boiled Wonderland: The Candy-Colored Kaleidoscopes Of Hilary Pecis,” 7×7, June 5, 2009 Beltran, JD, “New Art From Fresh Minds,” SF Gate, April 23, 2009 “Traversing Wilderness,” NY Arts Magazine, Jan/Feb 2009

2008 “Hilary Pecis,” New American Paintings, Issue #79, December 2008 Ray Huston, Johnny, “SF Guardian, Picks,” September 3, 2008 “Masterminds,” SF Weekly, March 19, 2008

2007 R. Klanten, S. Ehmann, B. Meyer, NeoGeo: A New Edge to Abstraction, Prestel. 2006 New American Paintings, Issue #67, December 2006.

It’s easy to fall in love with the work of Hilary Pecis at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton. Judging by the many paintings already sold there, quite a few have. The bright acrylic colors express themselves primarily as sun-filled interiors, but also occasional landscapes. The compositions are loaded with patterns that tend to block a way in, whether the bottom edge is a truncated view of a table or the tiny corner of a pool or pond’s border. It is a distancing device that makes the views seem more like complicated sets.

Although more realistic than Max Weber’s and less abstracted than Paul Cozen’s, her compositions share the same flattened presentation of space, with their components in danger of tumbling out of the picture plane. Her scale is often easel-sized rather than monumental, which is also reminiscent of early-20th-century modernism.

The paintings look deceptively simple mostly because there is too much to take in at first glance. Tablecloths, rugs, art books (sometimes open to specific illustrations), paintings on walls, glassware and ceramics, liquids, shadows, and light all become part of the mix. In some cases, the indoors is brought outside, as in “Outdoor Table,” in which the table covering, glassware, ceramic vase filled with lilies, wine bottle, pitcher, and bowls of strawberries and nuts look transported directly from indoors without thought to breakage. It is an elegant scene set in a garden, with poured glasses of rosé wine and another glass bearing something from a nearby pitcher. Rather than a party, a crossword book open to a completed puzzle and a pencil next to it point to more of a leisurely afternoon.

Humans are rarely in Ms. Pecis’s paintings and none are evident in this selection from this year. Yet they seem just on the edges, ready to enter the room and move a chess piece, take a sip from a paper coffee cup, or maybe sit down in a sunny corner of a “Clinton Hill Apartment.” “Dogwood,” her small nature study, is an easier read. It could be a tree, but the branches are pointing upward as if in a vase. Filling in the foreground behind the large blooms are lots of small visual echoes on tinier branches, but they are so close as to not adhere to basic rules of

perspective. This painting, with its very simple subject matter, is a kind of visual key to her other work. The artist seems to be stating what is important to her work in general, the layers upon layers, a scene not literally re-presented but a riff on it, often infused with subtle wit. Her earlier work was more complicated, but a move to Los Angeles in the last few years and a loss of studio space forced her to look closer at the spaces around her for inspiration. In doing so, she is not trying to be ironic or add a conceptual spin. As she told the news website SFGATE, “Before, with my work, I was trying to make something new, a new environment or new landscape. . . . With the current work, I’m not trying to do that, and I’m not trying to say something profound. Something that’s been of interest lately is just being sincere and being honest about making the work.”

Her care and detail in the interiors she captures — bending and abstracting art posters, a tablecloth, books, and a nearby plant through a fish bowl or other patterns through a glass of water — point to traditional painting conventions while filtering them through a modern sensibility. And that is likely why it is so popular. It is a soothing reflection on the spaces we call home and the moments we steal from a hectic and stressful environment. The show has been extended to Oct. 5. Matthew Kirk’s “Mountain Skin” is on view in the upstairs gallery.

Aiming to transpose traditional still life and landscape genres onto  contemporary L.A., Hilary Pecis’ From a Place in the Light risks boho-chic banality with its paintings of celebrity cemeteries and Rental Girl-worthy living rooms. Yet, Pecis is refreshingly resistant to the conceptual cuteness one might expect from such an effort. Rather, in these genre-blending acrylic canvases, she performs a sort of alchemy, transforming material that seems destined for cliché and heavy-handedness with winking humor and an exuberant approach to color and anecdotal detail.Tables, Flowers, and Books (2019) mimics itself across the canvas. The interior scene, which depicts two bouquets on a table, is repeated in books and posters that decorate the space. This visual quotation, together with the presence—in this painting and others—of books on prominent figures of 20th century art (e.g. Georgia O’Keefe, Betty Woodman, David Hockney), functions as a cheeky punchline, practically screaming a capital-A “Art!” from the canvas with a megaphone. But it’s Pecis’ craft that rises above the humorous and referential qualities of these works.

Echo Park Lake (2018) highlights Pecis’ confident use of brush and color. Starting with the cruder, imperfect blobs of the lily pads sprinkling the foreground, the middle of the painting melts into an overgrowth of dots and dashes—the line between original and reflected image lost in a verdant haze—before yielding to the firmer lines of palm trees, houses, and solid blue sky. This painting coaxes detail from the rest of the works: the pointillist strokes of Kaba on a Chair’s (2019) titular feline, the chaos of distorted light unleashed inside the glassware in Dinner (2019).While Pecis’ self-conscious attention to art history and L.A. myth might seem to beg a clearer engagement with social and cultural themes, the strength of her work lies in its stubborn refusal to break character. Thus, a painting of Echo Park Lake or a stack of expensive hardcover monographs—material seemingly fraught with both romantic associations of SoCal bohemia and the issues of gentrification and cultural elitism that come with them—serves as an unpretentious

showcase of Pecis’ singular style. Paradoxically, then, From a Place in the Light treats well-trodden locales with striking sensitivity, while flattening—in urban scenes almost entirely absent of human forms—the social landscape in which her paintings reside.

Hilary Pecis: From a Place in the Light runs from April 28–June 8, 2019 at The Pit (918 Ruberta Ave., Glendale, CA 91201).

Hilary PecisJOSHUA LINER GALLERY

The capacity to recognize patterns is what sets humans apart from other animals and from machines. Our ability to convert perceived arrangements into habits and inventions drives our looking and imagining, our reading and reasoning. We are hungry to intuit serial sequences everywhere, even where there are none—a condition known as apophenia, which is linked to gambling and conspiracy theories.

On the brighter side of our brain function, Hilary Pecis’s paintings seem to celebrate the joy of discerning and interpreting patterns in the everyday world. Nine paintings made up her excellent if modest showing in the back room of Joshua Liner Gallery, the largest canvases just over three feet in height. Still lifes or landscape views filled with color and patterns but very few people, their subjects were reassuringly ordinary, including a bowl of anemones, a cat sitting on a chair in a garden, palm trees bowing in the wind, a table just before being cleared.

A work reminiscent of Jane Freilicher showed a studio windowsill cluttered with jars of paint. Pecis goes one step further by clearly depicting the prices markered in black on the containers’ lids—a diagram of numbers in front of a gridded view.

Hilary Pecis, Dinner Party, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 30”

Gus’s Jerky Shop, 2017, for which Pecis painted a gray brick building (a former gas station near Death Valley, California, that’s become a destination for specialty dried meat) with its storefront window and bench plastered in bumper stickers and brand logos, was drabber than the other works, but still scenic. The artist’s execution of decals, bricks, and mottled ground marshals an intriguing spatial order out of haphazard circumstance.

Museum, 2017, is a New Yorker–cover view of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s tiered ramps during the recent Agnes Martin exhibition in New York. Dark silhouettes of visitors and guards cluster in front of monochrome squares in soft gray, pink, and tan on each level. Pecis manages to make the overall composition evoke a Martin painting in a simple and effective homage: The bands of the floors cross over a subdued museum background with Minimalist grace. The only other painting with figures was New Year’s Day, 2017, though we only glimpse a hand of someone and the arm of another among an assemblage of hair-of-the-dog victuals recognizable to a certain demographic: guacamole with a lone tortilla chip sunk into it, sriracha and Tapatío hot sauce, a French coffee press, Fiji water, Bloody Mary mix or perhaps salsa in a blender, Tropicana orange juice, champagne, celery, a bottle of rosé. The opaque, spherical objects are interrupted by two faceted glasses in the left foreground, which begin to break apart the things they sit in front of into refracted chips of color—as if the start of a whole other painting. This interior patterning also featured in the star of the show, Dinner Party, 2016, which channels Pierre Bonnard’s and Fairfield Porter’s still lifes. Both earlier masters used the table as a kind of surrogate for the blank canvas or palette, so that everyday objects become daubs of texture and materialized light as much as honeypots, saucers, and bread. Pecis embraces this genre with a riot of pattern. The table takes up most of the canvas, and its busy covering forms an abstract painting underlying all the objects on it: plates, wineglasses, cups, dishes, a bottle, and a lit candle. A few chairs are just discernible at the top of the composition; this almost negative space is painted in dark camouflage. Pecis’s dishware is solid orbs, while the glasses are awash in filtered transparency. In addition to water or wine, each contains marks indicating reflection that also suggest a tiny abstract painting or Fauvist landscape. One can imagine that Pecis’s canvases, with their neat brightness, all contain such portals, where the represented image bursts open into an inspired idea of its origins.

—Prudence Peiffer

Fake News  at CES Gallery

May 19, 2017

Text by Aaron Horst

In the 21st-century media environment we might be tempted, or persuaded, to forget that real life still has tangible contours. Real life is often figured instead as that behind the mirage that we supposedly inhabit.The artworks in Fake News at CES represent, as the press release would have it, the full flowering of art’s historical slide from the attempt to “tell… the story as accurately as possible.” Instead, the artists of today re-frame shifting, often vague impressions, or “distortions”—responses to media deluge, thereafter

Fake News (Installation View). Image courtesy of the artist and CES Gallery.

framed as the products of drenched minds. The handsomeness of many of the works shown suggests our reading needn’t be so dire.Ryan Travis Christian’s hilarious Poppin’ Summer (2017) pictures a cluster of cartoon chickens flocking towards a noseless pin-up, driven either by reverence or lust; Mark Posey’s Pink Saw (2017) is primitive, lovingly rendered near-anthropomorphism. What one has to do with the other in the context of “fake news” is anyone’s guess, aside from the fact of both being pleasurable to look at. In that regard, Adam Beris’ Peach (2017) may be the show’s lynchpin, if we are to divine intellectual heft from the breezy press release. Beris’ gross little figures, calling to mind both icing and excrement, invoke our need to imbue objects with meaning—a stubborn, persistent animism in the human mind that seeks a knowable contour within even the most nebulous conditions.Nebulousness is where Fake News leaves us, somewhere within the cleavage between truth and falsehood which the titular phrase willfully obscures. Speaking with a friend soon after the show—about real, sad events in our lives—left the distinct and palpable impression that real life is alive and well. “Fake news” after all, is mostly just drama, to which Fake News offers a thoughtful, mid-tempo antidote regardless of it’s lapses in thematic coherence.Fake News is on view May 5-28, 2017 at CES (711 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021).

Hilary Pecis, Sculpture Court(2017). Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and CES Gallery.