Hilary Pecis

Hilary Pecis was born in 1979 in Fullerton, California. She earned a BFA in 2006 and an MFA in 2009, both from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She later relocated to Los Angeles, where she lives and works today.

Pecis is known for densely patterned, color-saturated paintings of domestic interiors, tablescapes, bookshelves, and Southern California landscapes, rendered in a flattened style that critics have compared to Matisse and Hockney. Her early exhibition history ran through Bay Area venues, including a 2007 group show at Southern Exposure in San Francisco and a 2008 group exhibition at Dominican University of San Rafael, before she began showing regularly in Los Angeles and New York. Solo exhibitions followed at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York (2018, 2020), Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton (2019, 2021), and The Pit in Los Angeles (2019). Her international profile grew with a 2021 solo show, Piecemeal Rhythm, at Timothy Taylor in London, and David Kordansky Gallery announced its representation of the artist that same year, staging her debut solo exhibition with the gallery in 2022. She has since had solo shows at TAG Art Museum in Qingdao, China (2023), and returned to David Kordansky for Paths Crossed (2023) and Love Letters (2026), while Timothy Taylor presented her second London solo, Wandering, in 2025.

Pecis has drawn sustained attention from art publications for the way her paintings turn ordinary domestic scenes, cluttered tables, bookshelves, and backyard views into tightly organized fields of pattern and color. Artforum's coverage of her exhibitions has framed the work as a celebration of finding pattern in everyday life, while Juxtapoz Magazine's 2021 feature described her scenes as dioramas that expand and sprout detail, drawing comparisons to Matisse and Hockney. Her placement in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, has reinforced a critical consensus that her observational, decorative realism belongs within a broader contemporary revival of figuration and interior painting.

Pecis's current auction record is Wine at J's (2020), which sold for USD 1,260,000 at Christie's New York on 21 November 2024, narrowly surpassing the previous high of USD 1,250,000 set by Fish and Bird (2019) at Sotheby's New York on 2 March 2022. Works on paper have traded at far lower levels, reportedly up to about USD 44,100, according to market-tracking sources. Her auction history remains short relative to more established artists, reflecting a market still forming around a living painter whose primary gallery relationships date mostly to the past five to seven years.

Pecis's market is young: her auction record only recently crossed the one-million-dollar mark, and the number of public sales remains small, so individual results can move more on the specific work than on a clear market trend. There is no catalogue raisonne, which places extra weight on provenance from her two primary galleries, David Kordansky Gallery and Timothy Taylor, when buying on the secondary market. Strong institutional collecting activity, including a 2021 acquisition by the National Gallery of Art, is currently the clearest signal of long-term standing for an artist whose exhibition history is still being written.