CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/5/2022

Hot Book Alert: 'Hilary Pecis' is a New Release this week!

Featured spreads are from Hilary Pecis, the staff favorite new release published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. The first major monograph on the artist, it launches with a signing at Rachel Uffner gallery—where the work is currently on view—this Friday, May 6, from 4:30–6PM. In her catalogue essay, Johanna Fateman writes: “‘Being clever was never my strong suit,’ [Pecis] reflects, when describing how she arrived at her current representational style and subject matter. She frames her practice—still lifes and landscapes, broadly defined—as a retreat from relevance (whatever that means) or as a reprieve from trying to attain it (and thus an art career) under near-impossible conditions: Pecis has an almost nine-year-old son. When he was three, she thought she wouldn’t be showing anymore. Motherhood’s haunting reputation as an enemy to both creativity and professional achievement, plus a child’s real material and energetic demands, as well as a day job (she was a registrar at a gallery), had her reconsidering her struggle, dwelling on the MFA-program axiom that almost no one makes it as an artist. Maybe not being an artist would be fine. ‘I thought, I’m just going to go through my photos and make some paintings.’ The simplicity of the idea and the enjoyment she found in those first smallish paintings, made at home, tricked her into making it as an artist.”