Artist Statement
I am a figurative painter interested in memory, defiance, and gendered social power dynamics. I work to challenge the patriarchal history of painting. I do this by sourcing my femme figures from strangers’ personal photos, mining our collective, intimate histories for heroines and surrogate selves. Through intentional use of gaze, color, and materials, I queer and shapeshift my subjects into abstract environments. I layer gestural marks, oil pastel, collaged fabrics and paper, and atmospheric color fields to contrast areas of dimensionality and flatness. My otherworldly figures all stare directly at the viewer within these saturated dreamscapes. Rendered solid in concise oil brushwork, they coevolve with and merge into their limitless spaces.
I situate my work in an ongoing conversation about intimacy, power, and survival in a femme body. My paintings contain visual references which include German expressionism, pornography, and tacky sweaters. I use the fluidity of painting to blur lines between reality and fiction, care and harm, self and other. Glimpses of drawn plants, furniture, patterns, clouds, smoke, and cacti lend context and become a visual language articulating hidden hurts, desires, and aspirations. “Unfinished” paintings are always more interesting to me, so I choose to leave some areas open and less worked. This gives my work a raw and haunted quality. How does one remain whole when their bodily autonomy is taken from them? When I paint I am asking unflinching questions about consent, grief, and resistance.
I begin all my paintings with digital collages, and often use physical collage directly onto my canvases. I combine collage and painting to evoke past and present, examining how both become collectively fictionalized through memory and cultural stories. In past work, I have explored these themes using found textiles as a substrate, from picnic tablecloths to old patterned bedsheets. Since 2018, I have been developing a body of paintings on velvet titled “Keepers.” Painting on velvet allows me to play out material tensions of hardness vs softness, opacity and transparency. The history of velvet painting also opens conversations about class, kitsch, and commodity, all of which I relate back to the body. The untouched negative spaces of velvet function simultaneously as tactile flat surface and receding color fields implying deep, internal space.
Within the lush maximalism of my compositions there are moments of confident restraint: a sense of being unfinished, in-process, in flux, becoming, undoing old patterns and ways of thinking. My work is heavily influenced by the genre of magical realism, and its potential for imaginative, open-ended narratives. In each painting I am looking for new ways to order relationships between bodies (and gazes) in space.
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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Online Sales
Hilary Greenstein takes online orders for pickup and shipping through this website.
Pickup Hours
By appointment only. Please indicate desired pickup times when you check out.
Commissions
Hilary Greenstein takes commissions.

Hilary Greenstein is considered mobility accessible.




Image Gallery
Online Store
Double Standard

Both Sides

Double Standard

Final Girl

Earning My Stripes

Some Nerve

Keep It Light

Holding Your Own

Obviously 2 Framed

Obviously 1 Framed

Night Fruits
2022

Ending Trouble

You Know How People Are

Stubborn Enough

Green Light

Catching It

Up In The Air

Either Way

Hellbent

Sensitive

Everywhere You Go

You First

Start Naming Names

Venus 2
Prints
Stickers

Large Sticker 3″ Reprise
2019-2021

A Pointed Question

Been There

Nevermind

Settle Down

Stay a Little Longer

Toughluck

Where You Stand

Who’s There Now

Wish You Were Here

The Last Time

The Last Time 2

The Last Time 3

The Last Time 5

The Last Time 6

Allegedly

Unannounced

Tell Me When I’m Wrong

Take My Time
2017-2018

Coma, Splice

Heavy Weather

Inquiry 11

Inquiry 12

Inquiry 14

Inquiry 15

Lost Cause

Now I Know

Should I Be Worried About You?

Split Second

Standoff

Standstill

Tropical Depression 2
2016

Attention

Embrace 2

Embrace 3

Embrace 4

Embrace 6

Falling for It

Full of Space

Holes in My Mind

Mental Gymnastics

Thinking About Wishing
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