Timothy Taylor Gallery presents “Wandering“, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Hilary Pecis , now on view in London. The exhibition 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. She 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. 

Her work Silverlake Hillside, for instance, 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  her work 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. 

HILARY PECIS
WANDERING
TIMOTHY TAYLOR GALLERY
LONDON, UK
Through 19 July 2025
www.timothytaylor.com

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