David Kordansky Gallery presents Love Letters, a solo presentation of new paintings by Hilary Pecis.

Like counterarguments against nihilism, the artworks in Love Letters distill everyday sites of connection into a visual language that itself feels like sustenance. Throughout the exhibition, Pecis’s vivid odes of affinity refer to people, places, and activities of particular significance.

Depictions of the quotidian hang beside representations of personal milestones: the window of a friend’s art studio; the idiosyncratic signage of a Bay Area yacht club; a display of medals commemorating the dozens of races run by the artist, who likens the endurance sport to painting.

Pecis is best known for creating hyper-saturated still lifes, lived-in interiors, and unmistakably Californian landscapes that conjure the Los Angeles region as an intimate setting for dailiness. The works in Love Letters traffic fluidly in these typologies while also expanding their boundaries, presenting an array of subjects united by the mysterious élan of affection.

In keeping with the diaristic nature of her work, Pecis’s paintings originate in quick snapshots she frequently takes of scenes and views that catch her eye. As photographs become paintings, memory and intuition come to guide her process: visual noise is removed or replaced, colors are changed or heightened, and perspective is regularly reimagined.

The idea for Love Letters originated with the painting Backpackers, based on a photograph Pecis took more than fifteen years ago commemorating a trek up Mt. Shasta with her father, who named Pecis after the famed mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary.

Here, two bulging packs, ready to be hefted on, read as a single still from a larger narrative—the story of an outing as well as an ongoing familial relationship. Throughout the gallery, objects and environments suggest the spontaneous way the material world gives form to experience.

Pecis’s paintings rarely include figures directly, which is not to say that her paintings are free of people. The human traces that mark her mises en scéne are the paraphernalia of life itself—a hat set down, a crumpled napkin, a chair awaiting a sitter—whose players seem to have stepped out only momentarily.

HILARY PECIS
LOVE LETTERS
DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
LOS ANGELES, USA
Through 20 July 2026

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