Amy Hill, "Light, Shade and Product Placement

The Front Room Gallery is pleased to present: Light, Shade and Product Placement, a solo exhibition featuring the oil paintings of Amy Hill. This is Amy Hill’s 5th solo show with The Front Room Gallery, not including art fairs and offsite exhibitions. Amy Hill’s masterful paintings of contemporary daily life are underpinned with historical reference, connecting the past and the present. Her paintings, filled with references to painters as varied as Rafael, Degas, Tooker and de la Tour, feel timeless. 

Hill addresses contemporary issues such, as the influence of technology and consumerism, as her anachronistic scenes contain digital devices and contemporary commercial products. In Busy Office, four people are gathered around a table for a meeting. The figures are arranged with deliberate balance, engaged in an act of shared focus—gesturing towards documents, mobile devices, and screens—objects that serve as modern counterparts to the books, letters, and instruments found in 17th-century genre scenes. Two of them are discussing a pie chart reminiscent of Joseph Alber’s color wheel. Despite its contemporary elements—corporate coffee cups, digital devices, and analytical charts—the painting resonates with a timeless quality. The carefully placed objects on the table, including a stapler, an apple, and a cup filled with colored pencils, subtly allude to the vanitas tradition. Each subject is rendered with exquisite attention to detail, from the folds of their garments to the subtle highlights on their skin, recalling the luminous flesh tones of Vermeer and the meticulous compositions of de Hooch.

In Family with Cake, a meticulously rendered domestic scene imbued with an uncanny atmosphere. The composition is arranged with a masterful use of light and shadow, reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age interiors, yet with a distinctly surreal undertone. A family is gathered around a table adorned with balloons, glasses of soda, and a richly frosted birthday cake illuminated by flickering candles. The figures, their expressions eerily vacant, appear frozen in time—detached from the joy typically associated with such celebrations. The father, standing in the doorway with wide, luminous eyes, holds the cake with an unsettling stillness, his gaze conveying a ghostly intensity. The mother and child, seated in rigid postures, wear pointed party hats that contrast with their solemn, almost melancholic expressions. The three-liter bottle of Coca Cola in the forefront grounds us in the present.

Amy Hill is a New York-based artist who received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She has received grants from the Peter S. Reed Foundation and Art Matters, a studio grant from the Elizabeth Foundation and nominations for the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also received a Purchase Award from West Publishing Company and a Juror Award from the NYU Small Works Show. Hill has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and her work has been extensively reviewed in such publications as Harper’s Magazine, Artnet Magazine and the New York Times.

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