Los Angeles in the 21st century and French Neoclassicism of the 19th century unexpectedly converge in artist Hopie Stockman Hill’s painting of a bag of citrus casually placed on top of a hardcover volume about Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. In this painting, titled Ingres with Oranges, Hill’s treatment of a plastic bag holding fruit she bought at a local farmer’s market, is luminous with translucent folds. Her touch is no less precise or reverent here than how she recreates the sitter’s elaborate jewels and silk and lace garments printed on the book’s cover. L.A. has always had its ways of subverting traditional hierarchies, after all.
Hopie Stockman Hill, Ingres with Oranges (2024). Photo by Jeff McLane. Image courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett.
The composition, with its spontaneous genesis, is an exception to the otherwise meticulous arrangements in the body of work that opened at Charles Moffett on December 13. Hill’s first solo show, The Souvenirs, comprises one dozen deeply personal works. “I spend days bringing all of these pieces together from elements from my life in L.A., and styling the scene that I am trying to express an idea or a story,” she explained on a recent weekday morning in her studio in Frogtown situated a stone’s throw from the Los Angeles River, where sculptures and smaller works on paper by her now husband, furniture designer and artist Russell Hill, occupy one corner. Neighbors and friends include ceramist Ruby Neri and painter Austyn Weiner.
A raw, layered emotional core centers Hill’s visual vocabulary rendered through her masterful use of color, texture, and detail. Like the most resonant examples of still-life paintings, tableaux that might at first appear as cool and detached speak to intense truths. For Hill, this arc begins with Solitaire, in which the card game setup with a partially eaten banana and mug in view took on a sharper meaning in the aftermath of the end of the artist’s first marriage. Painting was a therapeutic tool while she was navigating the destabilization of divorce, but this level of precision is a practice that runs throughout her output. “There’s something meditative about painting surfaces and fabric, or repetitive textures,” she added.
Hopie Stockman Hill, Solitaire (2024). Photo by Jeff McLane. Image courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett.
Hill is adept at synthesizing signifiers of a millennial creative’s life in Los Angeles with her enduring admiration for still-life paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. “The sense of wonder at beauty defining the 17th-century still-life tradition has always felt thrilling to me,” the New Jersey native shared. She and her three sisters, including painter Lily Stockman who is also represented at Moffett, were raised with a broad exposure to art. “My mom used to sit me in her lap and we would open up art books” focusing on canonical figures such as Holbein, John Singer Sargent, and others. “We would look at clues that helped tell the story of the subject.”
Hopie Stockman Hill, Fertility Treatment (2024). Photo by Jeff McLane. Image courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett.
She has since forged her own pathway into an idiosyncratic, specific symbol-laden world. Hill’s themes and subject matter in The Souvenirs process new marriage, fertility struggles, pregnancy, and transition to becoming a working mother with her now 14-month-old son. In Fertility Treatment, Instagram culinary star Molly Baz’s Cook This Book peeks from behind a lamp surrounded by fresh eggs and citrus on Hill’s yellow and blue checkered tile kitchen countertop. “Lemons were a status symbol back in the 17th century. Now in my current life in L.A., a lot of those items have this kind of power to tell the story or reflect my experience,” Hill observes. The profound significance of citrus in California also figures into Backyard Lemons, in which snails attach themselves to the imperfect fruit sitting on a white tablecloth gridded with eyelet fabric in front of a floral patterned textile backdrop.
Hopie Stockman Hill, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Hill’s skill at incorporating textile patterns into her paintings isn’t a fluke. After graduating from Harvard Business School in 2012, she and Lily co-founded Block Shop, a textile, accessories, and home decor brand known for its effusive and earthy aesthetic that results from extensive research, as well as their uncompromisingly ethical business model. These have been parallel yet distinctive endeavors (like painting, “pattern design is about problem-solving and fitting things together,” she added), but now she is shifting her focus to painting. Block Shop is “outward in terms of what the project is about—adding to people’s spaces—whereas my painting practice is inward and introspective and solitary,” Hill shared. Even though “I’ve been painting forever,” Alec Egan’s invitation to join a group show at Anat Egbi Gallery in 2022 was a game-changing gesture that “catapulted this still-life practice,” culminating in this collection for Moffett that she’s developed over the past 15 months. Hill participated in group exhibitions at The Pit, Phillips, and James Cohan, too.
Hopie Stockman Hill, Miscarriage Flowers after Willem van Aelst (2024). Photo by Jeff McLane. Image courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett.
Women Dutch artists including Clara Peeters and Rachel Ruysch and French painter Louise Moillon—lesser-known figures in the annals of art history for the usual myriad reasons—particularly inspired The Souvenirs. “Clara Peeters was a total badass, and so technically gifted,” Hill said, pointing to a couple of instances where she “lifted” Peeters’ habit of including her own appearance in vessels, as was the accepted practice of male artists like Jan van Eyck. This gesture takes on more power “as an assertion of her position as a woman artist in a male-dominated world.” Hill offers a moving twist on Ruysch’s floral still-life accomplishments and her inclusion of a cut stem in Miscarriage Flowers after Willem van Aelst. “That’s kind of the vanitas,” Hill notes. “But in the way that vanitas is about mortality and our limited time on Earth, I think of it in my paintings more about fertility and my own journey as a woman.” Hill also cites Edith Wharton, painter Audrey Flack, and filmmaker Joanna Hogg as other “artists I’ve long admired. I love their use of interiors, spaces, and objects to create emotional landscapes that are reflections of characters’ interior worlds.”
Detail of Good News (2024) by Hopie Stockman Hill. Photo by Jeff McLane. Image courtesy the artist and Charles Moffett.
When it comes to the perennial art talk topic of the pendulum swing between abstraction and figurative expression, it’s clear where Hill’s own heart lies. “Part of the magic of painting right now is that there are a number of painters in L.A. that are making these maximalist, exuberant, colorful paintings,” she comments about colleagues such as Egan and Hilary Pecis. “I love that we’re exploring stylistically similar things, but with very different ideas and coming at it from really different places.” In addition to chromatically saturated imagery, Hill considers how technology creeps into these analog mediums. The slightly tilted, overhead POV framing cakes, fruit, wine, and other treats in her painting, Good News, for example, feels like a moment that could have been posted to the grid.
Any debates about shifting tastes, however, are ultimately irrelevant to Hill’s historically attuned orientation. “I find that my work is the most successful when I look to my favorite artists starting in the 15th century, and just keep doing what inspires me,” she explained.