Hopie Hill: The Souvenir

Charles Moffett is pleased to present The Souvenir, the first solo exhibition for Los Angeles-based artist Hopie Hill. This marks the artist’s inaugural exhibition with Charles Moffett and her first solo painting exhibition. A lifelong painter and student of classical drawing and painting, Hill began to devote herself to her professional painting practice in recent years, and has exhibited works in galleries including James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY (2024), The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2024), Mollie White Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023), and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA (2022).

For her new body of work, the artist drew 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 2024 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 — citrus from abundant orange or lemon tree groves, plump roses from a backyard garden, eggs from one’s own chickens. 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. Yet while she plays on her predecessors' themes of opulence and abundance, Hill is more strongly drawn to the tradition for its inherent mystery, its power to use suggestion and symbolic objects to tell a story rather than overtly illustrate the story itself.

Gathered together, the paintings in this exhibition capture the story of the artist’s hope to have a child. Intimate and vulnerable, they illustrate the ceremony, celebration, and homage of the small, often unseen moments that have characterized Hill’s 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.

The exhibition’s title is a nod to filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir film series. Hill’s paintings draw from Hogg’s treatment of the domestic landscape, and pull from other women artists’ and writers’ portrayals of interiors as reflections of the inner psyche, from Edith Wharton to Audrey Flack. When considering the film as inspiration for the show’s naming, Hill looked back to the origins of the word — souvenir first was used in the 12th century in France as a noun to mean “something in one’s memory,” and by the 17th century, it had evolved to mean “something that serves as a reminder.” Harkening back to the original 12th century meaning, the careful arrangement of judiciously selected objects that comprise Hill’s paintings suggest that these scenes exist not in the real world, but rather “in one’s memory”, more precisely in the the mind and heart of the artist herself, stories of  her life beautifully and vulnerably revealed.

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.