Hilary Pecis, born in 1979 in Fullerton, California, is known for her paintings and drawings that depict domestic still lifes and interior spaces with a distinctively vignette-like quality. Executed in saturated colour and delineated with bold, assertive line work, her compositions frequently evoke the light and palette of Southern California. Rather than centring the human figure, Pecis foregrounds objects, furnishings and décor – elements that serve as quiet proxies for human presence and lived experience. Her practice draws on the legacy of modernist movements such as Fauvism yet reinterprets these influences through a highly personal lens. Her visual language is attuned to the textures of everyday life: vibrant, orderly, and quietly intimate. Pecis’s work transforms the familiar into painterly tableaux, where the stillness of domestic space act as both subject and narrative.
Pecis has been the subject of solo exhibitions at TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2023); Rockefeller Center, New York (2021); and Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Flagler College, St. Augustine (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Map Reading of Painting, Daegu Art Museum (2024); Day for Night: New American Realism, Palazzo Barberini, organised by the Aïshti Foundation, Rome (2024); A Journey, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); The Interior Life: Recent Acquisitions, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2023); 13 Women: Variation I, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa (2022–2023); Common Ground: UCCA 15th Anniversary Patrons Collection Exhibition, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2022); Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art (2021); FEEDBACK, The School at Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, New York (2021); L.A.: Views, Maki Gallery, Tokyo (2020); and High Voltage, The Nassima-Landau Project, Tel Aviv (2020). Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Palm Springs Art Museum; and Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. Pecis lives and works in Los Angeles.