Artist Statement

I am a figurative painter that draws inspiration from vintage photographs, awkward pinups, cacti, and tacky sweaters. I use painting to blur lines between reality and fiction, care and harm, self and other. In contrast to art’s history of making the female body known, I use paint for its veiling effect, for its ability to seduce while resisting easy answers. Painting can be a disguise, a simultaneous revealing and re/veiling.

My female figures are all anachronistic, drawn from vintage found photos, painted into incomplete spaces outside time, where layers of dimensionality and flatness defy direct narratives. I am currently interested in painting figures on velvet. The tactile, provocative texture of the velvet and its association with kitsch keep me coming back to it. I am expanding my themes of fierce vulnerability to think more about queer gazes, intimacy, and care work. The narrative elements of my paintings are heavily influenced by magical realism as a genre, one that carries huge potential for writing queer histories and futures.

Artist Bio

Hilary Greenstein once cried while watching an Olive Garden commercial. She is also a fine artist and educator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2013.

You may have seen her paintings around Minnesota at Gamut Gallery, Rochester Center for the Arts, Rosalux Gallery, and Hopkins Center for the Arts. She paints in studio 206A of the California Building in Northeast Minneapolis, and opens her studio to the public for Art-a-Whirl. In her spare time, she works tirelessly to keep her cat, Charlemagne out of trouble. She is a Scorpio, but please don’t let that scare you.

I take commissions, please inquire!

FOllow me on instagram:  @hilarygreensteinart

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