Hilary Pecis: Wandering

Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce Wandering, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Hilary Pecis, opening in London on 12 June.  The artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery features paintings that offer kaleidoscopic compositions drawn from the artist's daily excursions.

Pecis is known for her vibrant still life and landscape paintings that elevate prosaic scenes with vivid combinations of colour, texture, linework, and pattern. Here, Pecis turns her focus to environments that are easy to pass by or overlook: stoops and curbs; a crowded pier; a street vendor's stand. Each painting starts from a photo the artist took during her long-distance runs, commutes to the studio, or travels. In these moments, Pecis is a flâneur or voyeur, observing surprise encounters of form in the outside world and translating them to the canvas. In dialogue with the work of the Fauvists and the Nabis-in particular, Matisse's liberated colour and compressed illusion of depth-her paintings feature subtle distortions of colour and scale to account for the embodied experience of viewing her subjects. In this way, her work illuminates instances of unlikely beauty in everyday life. 

Silverlake Hillside (all paintings 2025) depicts a juncture at a stoplight under an idyllic blue sky. In saturated colour, the composition features a seemingly random scene of dense landscaping, the iconic Western Exterminator building of East Los Angeles, fences, retaining walls, billboards, and a bluebird sky reflected in windows. The location is a freeway exit ramp that the artist passed on her weekday commute for five years. Pecis snapped dozens of photos of this setting as she waited at the stoplight, struck by the dynamics of the intersecting architectures and horizons. The painting has no central focus, but rather conveys the dazzling effect of movement in the built landscape and the artist's remarkable eye for pattern in the mundane. 

A display case in Greenpoint, Brooklyn is the subject of Bakery Display, featuring an array of nearly identical groupings of confections. Layers of chocolate sponge and meringue, pillows of whipped cream, plump cherries, and bouquets of berries are neatly arranged to create a seductive pattern. The painting pays homage to the delicacies of Wayne Thiebaud, himself a California painter who documented the American quotidian. Raised in Northern California, Pecis learned about art from her mother's calendars, which featured regional artists such as Roy De Forest and Thiebaud. But where Thiebaud's desserts are typically located in an anonymous, cream-colored space, Pecis's canvas revels in contextual detail-the ventilation slits in the display cooler, for example, form a rhythmic line across the bottom of the composition. 

Egret is the only painting with a central figure. In it, a milk-white bird is seen through branches. Standing in a creek, the heron's body is reflected in the water while its face is obscured by leaves. Pecis spotted the bird while running on the Gabrielino Trail in Angeles National Forest, an area she frequents and has painted numerous times before. The painting conveys the quiet stillness of the moment, despite the riotous abundance of nature. 

Water likewise features in Hotel Pool, in which the titular pool is defined by an effervescent pattern of ripples and distorted reflections, and in Dock Heron, where docked motorboats frame an unoccupied passage of gently rocking waves that take on the greyness of their surroundings. In each canvas, the spontaneous movement of water is distilled into a simplified but intense pattern, suggesting the otherworldliness inherent in the quotidian.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Pecis will be in conversation with art historian, curator, and broadcaster Katy Hessel, the author of The Story of Art Without Men. The event will take place at the gallery during the opening reception on Thursday 12 June at 5:30 pm.