HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY
AUGUST 31 - SEPTEMBER 29, 2019 | 79 NEWTOWN LANE, EAST HAMPTON, NY
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 6 - 8PM
For all inquiries please email info@halseymckay.com or call 631. 604.5770
HILARY PECIS - ADIOS VERANO
Hilary Pecis, Outdoor Table, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches
Halsey McKay presents Adios Verano, Hilary Pecis’ third solo show with the gallery. Hilary Pecis’ works reference the history and medium of painting. Following the traditional motifs of still life and landscape painting, Pecis challenges the genre with her use of energetic and vibrant swaths of color, highly pigmented patterns, and manipulated perspectives. Using her surroundings as inspiration, outtakes from dinner parties, friends' homes, gardens, collections and libraries are granted saturated life in visually stunning, modest memorials. The process of translating these photographs into paintings allows Pecis the opportunity to meditate on the specific moment and memory captured, helping her to create sincere translations of her own experiences. These are portraits without a figure that grant entry into the homes and spaces that the artist visits. Each picture leaves clues through which we glean an understanding of the artist herself.
Hilary Pecis received her Master of Fine Arts in 2009 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2006 from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Pecis’ work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at galleries such as Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as Vision Valley, Brand Library & Arts Center, Glendale, CA (2018); Shadow Shop, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2010); Fax, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2010); This is Your, This is My, University of Texas, San Antonio, TX (2009); New Landscapes, Dominican University of San Rafael, San Rafael, CA (2008); and Grounded, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA (2007). She has been the recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship and is a co-founder of Binder of Women, a collective of female artists based in the Los Angeles area. Pecis will have a solo exhibiton at the Crisp-Ellert Museum at Flagler College in January of 2020.
UPSTAIRS:
MATTHEW KIRK - MOUNTAIN SKIN
Matthew Kirk, Guy Lines, 2019, Mixed media on sheetrock panel in artist frame, 48 x 36 inches
Halsey McKay ipresents Mountain Skin, Matthew Kirk’s first solo show with the gallery. Kirk’s paintings exude a rhythmic intensity based in a matrix of mark-making that the artist has developed over the past decade. He freely mixes oil pastel, chalk, gouache, spray paint, graphite and acrylic, in a compositional strategy that merges a representation of the landscape of the Southwest and the freeform abstraction of music. Across Kirk’s oeuvre symbols from the natural world reappear – mountain ranges, celestial bodies, swirling and wide-eyed visages, caligraphic storm clouds and squalls. These marks are deftly built up and balanced in a distinct visual world of the artist’s own design. Kirk uses sheetrock and plywood as painting supports to celebrate the objectness of his pictorial works. Acting intuitively in the studio, these energetic all-over compositions of frenetic marks on humble materials serve as a ground to work out his thoughts about family, the stresses of daily life, and his own Navajo heritage.
Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganado, AZ) lives and works in Queens, NY. A self-taught artist, he has recently had exhibitions at Fierman Gallery, New York, NY; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago, IL; Louis B. James, New York, NY; Exit Art, New York, NY. His work has been published in The New York Observer, Modern Painters, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Kirk is a 2019 recipient of the Eiteljorg Museum Contemporary Art Fellowship in Indianapolis, IN where he will exhibit in November.
