HILARY PECIS

Early Life and Career

Born in Fullerton, California, in 1979, Hilary Pecis earned her BFA in 2006 and MFA in 2009 from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. During art school, she focused on conceptually driven abstract collage before gradually shifting toward figurative painting, a change that became more pronounced after she moved to Los Angeles. Alongside her studio practice, she worked for several years in gallery administration in Los Angeles, including as a registrar at David Kordansky Gallery, before committing to painting full-time in 2019. In 2017, she co‑founded Binder of Women, a Los Angeles-based collective and platform supporting contemporary female-identifying artists.

Today, Pecis lives and works in Los Angeles.

Still Life and Landscape Paintings

Pecis is best known for her interior still lifes, which depict coffee tables, bookshelves, and dining tables crowded with objects such as houseplants, art books, dishes, and records. Paintings like Camellias (2018), Collection (2020), and Untitled Interior (2020) stage these details within brightly coloured rooms where patterned rugs, tiled floors, and hanging pictures form interlocking planes of colour and line. She typically begins from archival snapshots or photographs taken in her own and friends’ homes, translating them into compositions sketched directly onto canvas with crisp geometric drawing before building up flat yet highly articulated fields of acrylic colour.

Her landscape paintings extend this approach outdoors to sun‑drenched Southern California streets, gardens, and foothills. Works such as Backyard View (2018), Car Wash (2018), Botanical Gardens (2019), Gabrielino (2021), and later canvases of hiking trails and roadside plantings juxtapose mountainous horizons with dense arrangements of succulents, flowering shrubs, and signage. Across interiors and exteriors, Pecis flattens perspective and simplifies forms into bold silhouettes, creating compositions that echo aspects of Henri Matisse, David Hockney, Fauvism, and Californian Funk while retaining a distinct, contemporary sensibility.

Themes and Context

Pecis’ work explores how identity—both lived and aspirational—is constructed and revealed through the objects and spaces that people curate around themselves. Her densely packed tablescapes and bookshelves often feature visible art monographs, album covers, and framed images, turning each painting into a portrait assembled from cultural references, leisure habits, and everyday clutter rather than from figures. By rendering domestic and local environments in a bright, graphic style, she aligns with contemporary tendencies that revisit post‑impressionist and Fauvist colour, while also speaking to current interest in the politics of the home, care, and the overlooked spaces of daily life.

Hilary Pecis Exhibited

In September 2021, David Kordansky Gallery, where Pecis had worked for five years, announced its representation of the artist with her debut solo exhibition at the gallery scheduled for 2022.

The 2021 edition of Art Production Fund’s ‘Art in Focus’ series featured Hilary Pecis’ paintings and mixed media installations in multiple locations throughout the Rockefeller Center.

Hilary Pecis’ work is held in public museum collections predominantly in China, including Zhuzhong Museum, Beijing; Budi Tek Yuz Museum, Shanghai; and Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, among others.

Exhibitions

Hilary Pecis’ solo exhibitions include Hilary Pecis: Piecemeal Rhythm, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2021); Art in Focus, Rockefeller Center, New York (2021); Delivered by the Foehn Winds, Spurs Gallery, Beijing (2020); Come Along With Me, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2020); From a Place in the Light, The Pit, Los Angeles (2019); Familiar View, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco (2018); and On View, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2018), among others.

Hilary Pecis’ group exhibitions include Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Art Museum (2021); 10 Years, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2021); The Beatitudes of Malibu, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Dear John, Adams and Ollman, Portland (2021); L.A.: Views, Maki Gallery, Tokyo (2020); Nothing (But Flowers), Karma, New York (2020); Dwelling Is The Light, Timothy Taylor, London (2020); How They Ran, Over the Influence, Los Angeles (2018); and Sun Gazers, The Pit, Glendale (2018), among others.

Hilary Pecis’ website can be found here and her Instagram can be found here.

Hilary Pecis FAQs

Annabel Downes | Ocula | 2026