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Lot Essay
Meticulously rendered with vivid, hyper-real clarity, Kaba on a Chair exemplifies Hilary Pecis’ intimate domestic scenes. Crisp, precise strokes chart the cat’s fur and the weave of the rug, each a luxuriant, tactile expression of pattern and texture. Two vibrant artworks hang in the background, while a potted plant resides in the corner: the scene is immaculately staged, fuelled by a complex interplay of geometry, perspective and colour. Painted in 2019, the work captures Pecis’ debt to the aesthetics of Fauvism and Pop Art, as well as the bright, luminous world of Los Angeles where she currently lives and works. The artist has risen to prominence in recent years: following her exhibition at the Crisp Ellert Art Museum in 2020, she mounted a solo show at New York’s Rockefeller Centre this summer, as part of its ‘Art in Focus’ series. Her work is currently on view at the Columbus Art Museum, Ohio for the launch of the Scantland Collection, which features paintings by young contemporary artists including Julie Curtiss, Emily Mae Smith and Claire Tabouret.
Influenced by David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Andre Derain, among others, Pecis belongs to a generation of artists who have breathed new life into figurative painting in the twenty-first century. Much like her contemporary Jonas Wood, she draws inspiration from her surroundings, working primarily from her own photographs. ‘From there, I make a loose sketch of the composition directly on the canvas and then noodle away until the painting feels finished’, she explains. ‘Oftentimes the outcome is far from the foresight that I had in the beginning of the painting, which is part of the magic in making a painting’ (H. Pecis, quoted in G. Vitello, ‘Hilary Pecis: The Humble is Whole’, Juxtapoz, 12 June 2021). In the transition from photography to canvas, Pecis slowly warps her subject matter, playing with lighting, pattern, tonality and composition: the results, as seen here, are at once familiar and otherworldly, quotidian yet surreal. Cats feature frequently throughout her oeuvre, while people remain conspicuously absent. Here, the poised green-eyed feline serves to enhance the work’s dream-like atmosphere, its quizzical expression curiously human.
Influenced by David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Andre Derain, among others, Pecis belongs to a generation of artists who have breathed new life into figurative painting in the twenty-first century. Much like her contemporary Jonas Wood, she draws inspiration from her surroundings, working primarily from her own photographs. ‘From there, I make a loose sketch of the composition directly on the canvas and then noodle away until the painting feels finished’, she explains. ‘Oftentimes the outcome is far from the foresight that I had in the beginning of the painting, which is part of the magic in making a painting’ (H. Pecis, quoted in G. Vitello, ‘Hilary Pecis: The Humble is Whole’, Juxtapoz, 12 June 2021). In the transition from photography to canvas, Pecis slowly warps her subject matter, playing with lighting, pattern, tonality and composition: the results, as seen here, are at once familiar and otherworldly, quotidian yet surreal. Cats feature frequently throughout her oeuvre, while people remain conspicuously absent. Here, the poised green-eyed feline serves to enhance the work’s dream-like atmosphere, its quizzical expression curiously human.