FOG Design + Art 2026
At FOG Design + Art 2026, Charles Moffett is honored to present works by Los Angeles-based artist Hopie Hill. Building on the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, The Souvenir (winter 2024 - 2025), the gallery’s booth will include a series of new paintings that continue the artist’s contemporary and intimately personal explorations of the traditional genre of still life painting.
A lifelong painter and student of classical drawing and painting, Hill draws important inspiration from Dutch Golden Age Still Life paintings, particularly the work of women artists of that period, such as Clara Peeters and Rachel Ruysch, as well as French painter Louise Moillon. During this historical period, still life painting was rich in symbolism and reflected the values and mores of contemporary society, probing themes of power, wonder, transience, and the fleeting nature of time. Now in contemporary Los Angeles, Hill observes that many of the very same flora and fauna from that era serve as similar tokens of a certain idealized West Coast living — fresh citrus and eggs, gardens filled with plump roses, brilliant-colored irises, and high-reaching allium drawing all kinds of butterflies, birds and other creatures. All of the objects in her paintings are from Los Angeles, and she often spends days gathering and assembling them alongside personal totems to meticulously craft her compositions. Hill’s paintings play on her predecessors’ themes of opulence and abundance; yet she is more strongly drawn to the still life tradition for its inherent mystery, its power to use suggestion and symbolic objects to tell an otherwise unspoken story.
Much of Hill’s paintings reflect her recent pursuit and experience of new motherhood — a phase of life that can garner some of its most challenging and heartbreaking moments, yet often remains concealed. Intimate, brave, and vulnerable, her paintings illustrate the ceremony, celebration, and homage of the small moments that have characterized her personal experiences of divorce, love, faith, self-doubt, early motherhood, overwhelming joy, and acute sorrow. Hill’s refined symbolic visual language potently channels her reflections on this period of life, one that seems to hover between the earthly and the spiritual.
For Hill, objects serve not only their utilitarian purpose, but function as vessels for memories, reminders of past moments, experiences and emotions. While grounded deeply in the real material world that surrounds her, the careful arrangement of judiciously selected objects that comprise Hill’s paintings suggest that these scenes exist more in memory than reality; serving as glimpses into the unseen inner world of the artist herself.
Hopie Hill (b. 1984, Providence, RI; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. MBA Harvard University 2014, BA Brown University 2007.) Hill studied classical drawing and painting throughout her life, focusing on English Literature and Visual Arts at Brown University. Her professional painting practice began in 2022 with her first body of work exploring still life painting. She is the founder and Creative Director of the LA-based home textile brand Block Shop Textiles. Her background before starting Block Shop was in investment research and marketing. She went to business school at Harvard, where she focused her research in social entrepreneurship. She’s been painting the whole way through.