DIMIN presents work by Justine Hill, Michi Meko, Brennen Steines, & Stephen Thorpe at the Dallas Art Fair

April 4-7, 2024
BOOTH - C11

Connect #3
April 13 - July 24, 2024
MAKI Gallery
Omotesando, Tokyo

Artists: Justine Hill, Miya Ando, Shiori Tono, Ayumu Yamamoto, Sofia Yeganeh

Justine Hill / Shiori Tono / Ayumu Yamamoto
January 2 - 26, 2024

Isetan Shinjuku Store Main Building
2nd Floor Isetan The Space
Tokyo, Japan

MAKI Gallery is holding a special exhibition at Isetan The Space focusing on three female artists who are currently attracting attention. A collection of vibrant works to brighten up the new year!

Interplay
November 30, 2023 - January 6, 2024
Justine Hill, Zahra Nazari, Nora Maité Nieves, Anna Pietrzak, Mia Weiner

Hollis Taggart
521 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor

The Evolution of Justine Hill
November 19, 2023
Contributed by Riad Miah

It is a pleasure to watch an artist evolve and see surprising changes, as in the case of Justine Hill with her current exhibition “Omphalos” at Dimin Gallery. Over the course of four solos, elements of her work have remained consistent. These include the cut-out shapes that jostle to fit together, and the color that complements (or contradicts) abutting forms. Hill’s earlier work has been likened to the masterful Elizabeth Murray’s. The comparison was apt enough insofar as she, like Murray, worked on irregularly shaped canvases, but it didn’t seem to go much deeper than that until now. Hill still employs shaped canvases, and has now incorporated figuration into the cut-outs, reinforced by earth tones. Murray, too, would sometimes begin with a tangible and recognizable form – that of a cup or a painter’s palette, for instance – and in the painting process abstract it into a reborn cognate. In her whimsical choice and transformation of shapes, Hill generates kindred charm and humor...

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Artists to Watch This Month: 10 Solo Gallery Shows in New York Not to Miss in October
Artnet News
By: Annikka Olsen, October 14, 2023

Justine Hill, “Omphalos”
Dimin, October 20–November 25

In a suite of new works for Dimin, Justine Hill employs her signature, idiosyncratically shaped paintings to further her investigations into human form, scale, and narrative, tapping into themes from mythology, folklore, as well as contemporary literature. The show’s title Omphalos, means “navel of the earth” in Greek mythology and Hill has borrowed science fiction author Ted Chiang’s use of this word for her own work, citing his short story of the same name that asks: which better exhibits proof of a creator, a navel or no navel? Hill has progressively incorporated more appendages and constructed increasingly figurative supports in her sculptural paintings, and her recent body of work is the most humanoid yet.

Based in New York City, Hill recently concluded an Elizabeth Murray Art Residency by Collar Works in upstate New York. Last year, she was the subject of a solo show at Maki Gallery, Tokyo, and completed a large-scale commission for the College of the Holy Cross—Hill’s alma mater, where she received her B.A. in 2008—which was on view through July of this year.

Justine Hill: Omphalos
October 20 - November 25, 2023
Reception: Friday, October 27th, 6-8pm
DIMIN, New York, NY

DIMIN is pleased to present a new body of work by Justine Hill titled "Omphalos". In this exhibition, Hill expands her practice of landscape building by posing questions about anthropomorphic form, story telling, and scale and position.

Hill consistently oscilates between a human and a cosmic scale; from painting a single waterfall, to the solar system or a domestic arrangement of furniture, she explores how we position the human body and mind in relation to objects in our natural and fantastical worlds. To borrow a term Lee Bontecou used to describe her soot drawings, Hill’s “worldscapes” are an investigation to better understand our place.

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April 27 – May 27, 2023
New York, NY

A full survey of the vast practice encompassing abstracted thought is nearly impossible for one gallery to undertake. Contemporary artists have countless sources to build upon, be they historical movements such as the New York School, the Minimalists, the Neo Expressionists, etc; or simply peer conversations in reaction to the recent focus on the figure. Regardless of impetus, today is an exciting time for abstract art, and Surface Level showcases eight artists at the forefront of abstraction: Amie Cunat, Brennen Steines, Courtney Childress, Jillian Mayer, Justine Hill, Kennedy Yanko, Nsenga Knight, and Ye Qin Zhu.

Video footage of the six month process from early sketches, artistic references, building and painting in the studio, to installing "The Travelers" at the College of the Holy Cross.

"The Travelers" is a large-scale work by Justine Hill, commissioned by the Cantor Art Gallery at the College of Holy Cross where Hill received her BA. The artist is known for her free form segmented works where her organically cut shapes are covered in canvas, then collaged with different media such as paint, pencil and crayon.

"The Travelers" is the inaugural project in the Cantor Window of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery in the new Prior Performing Arts Center at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA and will be on view from September 2022 to July 2023.

JUSTINE HILL AT UNTITLED ART FAIR WITH DENNY DIMIN GALLERY

Justine Hill is a New York City based artist that is showed with Denny Dimin Gallery this year at Untitled, Miami. Hill creates fragmented shaped canvas pieces that reference ruins, creatures, and colors and patterns of her whim. As an intuitive creator, Hill sketches shapes and practices pattern making as an act of preparation but allows the pieces to come together organically. Her most recent series has ties to Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. Under the shapes and colors lies an interest in communication and the role humans play in creating and also breaking down their own discoveries.

Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Justine Hill at Untitled Art Fair
November 30, 2022

Untitled Art Fair with Denny Dimin Gallery
November 29 - December 3, 2022
Miami Beach, FL

Artists: Jessie Edelman, Justine Hill, Judy Ledgerwood, Stephen Thorpe, and Paula Wilson

Booth: B30

“The Travelers”
September 2022 - June 2023
The Cantor Window of the Prior Performing Arts Center
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA

Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 14th, 5-7pm

The Travelers was commissioned by the Cantor Art Gallery of Brooklyn-based artist Justine Hill. In this large-scale painting, the artist has covered shaped panels in canvas, and then layered them with paint, paper, pencil, appliques, and crayon; Hill’s compositions often utilize pattern, bright colors, and loose mark-making in complex and unique combinations. While her shapes allude to animal or human forms, they equally suggest landscape or place, and at times morph fluidly into pure symbol. For Hill, the forms are “both entire worlds and individuals, or perhaps entire worlds built by individuals all dressed up in beautiful decorative patterns.”

Created specifically for the Cantor window, The Travelers plays with the ambiguity of place and person. The monumental scale heightens the work's ability to evoke place, while the animate forms reference the titular travelers. By conjuring a fantastic, distant world through the paired moons, Hill draws from her interest in science fiction and fantasy novels (including the work of Ursula le Guin, Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin), as well as the production of Philip Glass’s 1983 opera Akhnaten, about the life and religious convictions of the Egyptian Pharaoh. In Hill’s words: “These stories of power and hardship, in unknown or extinct worlds, often show the dangerous possibilities in the creation of symbols, myths and common beliefs, but also the necessity for order and beauty to produce comfort and safety.”

A new initiative for the Cantor Art Gallery, the Cantor Window Commission is an opportunity to invite artists annually to create a site-specific artwork. The Cantor is honored to present Justine Hill’s work as its inaugural installation; the artist is a 2008 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross.

- Meredith Fluke, Ph.D
Director, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery
College of the Holy Cross

June 23 - July 23, 2022
Birmingham, Alabama

Step outside on most clear nights, gaze upward, and you’ll probably see him. Orion, the great Greek hunter, anchoring our night. Likely, if you were taught to find this constellation, you focused on the belt: three stars. Dig a little deeper, and you might learn that The Orion Project, a mid-twentieth century space program, was developed to see if humans could be propelled into space — through a series of atomic explosions.

But really, it’s the three that matters, those three stars on the belt. You may well envision them when you first heard the word in the context of this exhibition. And how fitting. This is an exploration of three stars, three artists mapping their own unique paths. We’re lucky, too. That relationship we imagine as the space/time continuum invites us, even demands us, to look for unexpected interconnections between object and moment.

So, Orion — a group exhibition curated by participating artist Jason Stopa, which includes works by Justine Hill, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, and Stopa himself — is as much an examination of adjacency as it is an understanding of experience.

January 28 - March 19, 2022
MAKI Gallery, Tennoz I, Tokyo

The show’s title, Alternates, is a reference to the “alternate history” genre of speculative fiction. Hill’s work brings together elements from various artists and time periods, conjuring theoretical situations in which the eccentric shapes of Elizabeth Murray, the complex architecture of Lee Bontecou, and the diamond-like patterns of Judy Ledgerwood can all coexist. Perhaps the strongest influence on Hill’s work is the Pattern & Decoration movement, which has experienced increased reassessment over the past few years after decades of being snubbed by critics as garish and trivial. Hill’s paintings share P&D’s focus on everyday motifs and quirky patterns—they embrace the repetitious labor that permeates both domestic and creative life and resonate particularly deeply with a post-pandemic public that has spent so much time indoors.

Hill believes artists never start from scratch; every work inherits traits from a myriad of sources, whether intentionally or unintentionally. By piecing together ideas drawn from her own expressive lineage, the artist recognizes she does not exist in a vacuum, and she cannot make art alone. As if to embody this idea, Hill’s “Cutouts” are entirely co-dependent, sometimes literally leaning on each other for support. Please take this opportunity to converse with Hill’s whimsical works in person and build your own interpretations from her enigmatic shapes.

January 21 – February 26, 2022
TOA Presents, Minneapolis, MN

A group exhibition organized by Amir H. Fallah and Mark Schoening, featuring both artists alongside Amie Cunat, Asad Faulwell, Wendell Gladstone, Sherin Guirguis, Justine Hill, Dennis Koch and Geoffrey Todd Smith.

Translated from Latin as the “fear of empty space,” the term Horror Vacui first became associated with art and design when Italian critic Mario Praz used it to address the Victorian-era obsession with visual clutter. Within contemporary visual art, it names an artist’s compulsion to load the entirety of a picture plane with detail. In the act of leaving nothing vacant, our fear of vacancy is put to rest.

Yet what we choose to fill space with can appear vastly different from wall to wall, edge to edge. While artists in the exhibition are tethered to a shared language of pattern and color, each diverges into their own dialect. Spanning arabesque tessellations, uncanny tableaus and optical illusions, the works in Horror Vacui challenge our visual perception, reminding us of how fickle the eye can be.

The Armory Show
September 9-12, 2021

Artists:
Justine Hill, Erin O’Keefe & Amanda Valdez

Galleries Section
Denny Dimin Gallery
Booth 408

“Highlights from ‘With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985'”
August 2, 2021
By Osman Can Yerebakan

"...Known for her bright-colored whimsical cut-out paintings, Hill cites Cynthia Carlson, who is also a part of “Fringe,” as a strong influence, and this acrylic and paper arch-like painting is a stark proof. Similar to Carlson’s use interiority and painting through form, Hill creates portals for the subliminal with zigzagged gestures and immediate forms which absorb the viewer through their playfulness. The similarity between two artist’s contribution to the Denny Dimin show also lies in their use of multiple panels to play with painting’s notion of flatness and unity..."

Wild Frontiers
July 17 - Aug 21, 2021
Opening Reception July 17th, 4-7pm
The Pit, Los Angeles

...Wild Frontiers is an anti-conquest, salon-style passion play that collects works from over twenty-five artists in favor of encouraging happy collisions, enigmatic conversations, and freaky coincidences. Bright color, ecstatic weirdness, Maximalism, and visionary high times pulsate from every aesthetic zone like distant stars across the universe that individually sparkle to transmit exceptional compatibility. Decadence has entered the building; Wild Frontiers is a cornucopia of flamboyant abstraction and sybaritic figurative drama that subliminally imagines physical contact. This exhibition furthers The Pit’s tradition of curating to encourage new connections, alliances, and avenues between artists who should definitely know each other. Is it time for revelry yet? Not sure, but shout-outs for Pleasure as we remember, reintroduce, and reenter are certainly called for.

Fringe
July 8 – August 20, 2021
Opening Reception July 8th, 6-8pm

Fringe was inspired by recent exhibitions of the Pattern and Decoration (P & D) art movement from the 1970s and its resonance and resurgence with many contemporary artists. The movement’s privileging of materials such as textiles and ceramics, its promotion of female artists and its interest in domestic space as a place for creativity, all connect it strongly to the concerns of contemporary artists half a century later….

Two paintings found their way into “Inside This Upper East Side Pied-à-Terre, Every Detail Matters” in Architectural Digest.

Interior designer Gregory Rockwell crafts a colorful New York City apartment

By Hannah Martin
Photography by Ori Harpaz
April 14, 2021

Mar 23 - May 1, 2021

MAKI Gallery is pleased to present works of Justine Hill, Jennifer Rochlin, Miya Ando, and Shiori Tono. The works created by these four female artists give off a unique presence with their own creative process, colors and shape expressions, with subjects such as nature, memories, landscapes and narratives. Please enjoy the finest selection of works by these four artists at the gallery.

Justine Hill’s bright, multipart paintings are good and good fun, but it has taken some serious work to get them there. You can see it happening in “Touch,” her latest solo show in New York.

Five years ago, Ms. Hill broke her paintings into separate parts by cutting out eccentric shapes in plywood that she would cover with canvas, paint with various colors or patterns and hang together in rectangular configurations on the wall. The plywood is thin, making the works seem flatter to the wall than most paintings. They might almost be frescoes.

The paintings from 2020 are better than those from 2019 (one is on view; three are in the catalog). Looser, jauntier, they make more of less. Ms. Hill has been using more white: that is, arranging the parts of her paintings over greater areas of wall space. This expansion helps. She’s also using fewer colors (often two) on each part. And there’s as much drawing as painting: repeating waves in, say, goldenrod yellow or lipstick pink on black or white and networks of intersecting lines, some of which form harlequin patterns. The shapes often have resemblances — sometimes more than one — to columns or arches, tables or stools, baskets or vases. In fact two of the larger works, “Kilter” and the appropriately titled “Handwork” (craft is a big subject here), can read as stage-set-like interiors.

In the three paintings from her new “Replica” series, Ms. Hill heads in a more abstract direction, which is promising. In addition to Matisse and Picasso, she has paid attention to 1970s Pattern & Decoration painting, the ceramic wall pieces of Betty Woodman and the shaped paintings of Elizabeth Murray. Ms. Hill’s work proves that earlier ideas can always sustain new thought.

ROBERTA SMITH

IN CONVERSATION
Join Justine Hill and art historian and catalog essay writer, Dana Rodriguez as they discuss Hill’s current exhibition “Touch.”

Wednesday, October 14th, 6-7pm EDT

Watch the Zoom recording

Exhibition catalog for Justine Hill Touch an exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York City, September 10 - October 31, 2020. Catalog essay by Dana Rodriguez.

Dana Rodriguez is a recent graduate from the Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies program at Columbia University. Previously, she received a BA in Art History and a BS in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an emerging curator and writer, she has worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, North Carolina Museum of Art, Ackland Art Museum, and with various art advisory firms.

Available to view online and for purchase.

By: Caroline Goldstein, September 23, 2020

Why it’s worth a look: The colorful cut-out abstractions in Hill’s work are delightful to view online, and even better to see in person. Hill’s most recent series of works, titled “Replica,” are responses to the art of Marina Adams, whose abstract paintings incorporate geometric shapes and bright colors. Hill’s works evoke homemade crafts and magic markers, though their large-scale sculptural aspects and shaped canvases nod to other art-historical precedents, such as Frank Stella’s “Moby Dick” series. The works make you want to grab some art supplies and go to town.

View on Artnet News

Touch at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY
Sep 10 - Oct 31, 2020

Denny Dimin Gallery is pleased to announce Touch, a solo exhibition by Justine Hill on view from September 10th to October 31st, 2020, in the New York location. This is Hill’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. A catalog will accompany the exhibition with an essay by art historian Dana Rodriguez.

Read full press release at Denny Dimin Gallery.

Sneak peak into my new studio and new work for my upcoming exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery for this fall.

Watch the Video!

Pull at Masahiro Maki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
April 14 - May 23, 2020

MASAHIRO MAKI GALLERY is pleased to present Pull, the first solo exhibition to be held in Japan by Justine Hill, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. The fourteen colorfully painted works on irregularly-shaped canvases fuel the imagination and inspire in many ways.

View the Press Release
Visit the exhibition Viewing Room

Five Questions for Artists
By Lisa Kellner

February 21, 2020

Fanfare is a group exhibition exploring pattern.
Curated by Amie Cunat.

January 23 – March 13, 2020
Reception: Thursday, January 23, 6-8pm
Printed catalog with essays by Francesca Aton and Sarah Cascone.

Artists: Beverly Acha, Elizabeth Corkery, Gail Fitzgerald, Justine Hill, Mary Lum, Joiri Minaya, Rebecca Shore, Karen Tepaz

Fordham University | Ildiko Butler Gallery
113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023

Backdrops with Art-in-Buildings
October 22, 2019 – March 8, 2020
125 Maiden Lane, New York, NY

Justine Hill's exhibition Backdrops brings the artist's most recent installation Standing (2019) and a selection of her series Heads (2018) to the lobby of 125 Maiden Lane. A painter that works primarily in shaped canvases she calls 'cutouts,' Hill's work explores the visual and physical boundaries of the painted surface. The artist layers her shaped canvases with bold brushstrokes that at once emphasize and conceal their structure. In Standing, Hill pushes the surface of her painting even further into the realm of sculpture by pulling painted two-dimensional elements away from a canvas backdrop. Viewed from the front, the images flatten to create a landscape. From the side, they resemble a shallow theater set of an imaginary world. Informed by a ballet collaboration with choreographer Michelle Thompson Ulerich where Hill's paintings were used as a moveable mis-en-scene for dancers, Hill began to consider the fluid nature of separating painted objects in space and creating physical depth in her work.

On the opposite side of the 125 Maiden Lane lobby is Hill's earlier series, Heads. The artist describes these paintings as an attempt "to reclaim the white space behind her cutouts" by placing them on top of an unstretched canvas substrate. The resulting abstracted portraits are composed of two split layers, the headshot and the backdrop, which Hill seamlessly unifies through her intrepid application of color, effectively blending the inserted "heads" with their canvas frame. Pushing dimensionality even further, Hill's installation at 125 Maiden Lane includes a custom printed wallpaper backdrop. Mirroring Standing's conflation of the wall, the painting, and the foreground – this new installation of Heads equally considers all three elements. In Backdrops, Hill tests the realm of three dimensionality through a strictly two dimensional lens.

Breaking the Frame
Hollis Taggart, New York, NY
October 24 - December 14, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 24th 6-8 pm

The gallery will inaugurate the new location on October 24, 2019 with the opening of Breaking the Frame, a group exhibition of work by contemporary artists Leah Guadagnoli, Dana James, Justine Hill, Eric Shaw, and Jason Stopa. Breaking the Frame explores the ways in which the featured artists are engaging with the physicality of traditional painting, from the incorporation of illusionistic brushwork to the use of architectural motifs to the layering and morphing of materials to create depth and alter form. The exhibition also highlights new approaches within abstract painting, considering how today’s practitioners continue to engage with the aesthetic and conceptual underpinnings of significant art movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism as well as the ongoing relevance of geometric painting and the shaped canvas.

I made three new pieces for Denny Dimin Gallery's inaugural Virtual Exhibition titled "Hold the Capstone".

September 18 - October 8, 2019

...Virtual is a new series of exhibitions presented exclusively online. The limited run exhibitions will complement our IRL programming at the gallery and fairs with a small selections of artworks. Behind-the-scenes videos will bring the immediate experience of art viewing online for a remote audience....

Exhibiting new work at EXPO Chicago with Denny Dimin Gallery alongside Luke Diiorio.

September 19-22, 2019
Chicago | Navy Pier

Interviewed by Frédéric Caillard in February 2019
Published by Abstract Room on August, 28, 2019

Excerpt:
...
Does the absence of frame change the way you compose, as you are not limited by the edges of the rectangular canvas anymore?

I feel like the edges and the frame have become even more important. They are so much more intentional in the shaped works. This is why I spend more and more time on the front end of the planning stage. I am picking the exact edge I want a form to stop or start at. There is no idea of continuation. With the rectangle you can still play with the idea that it continues or keep going outside the canvas, but these shaped panels are very contained.
...

May 2, 2019
"CounterPointe: Artists and choreographers collaborate"
Contributed by Sharon Butler

Excerpt:

...Justine Hill and Michelle Thompson Ulerich’s “Shapeshifters” also featured a duet, but rather than yearning, this one captured a kind of striving. The dancers, wearing white outfits that might have come from The Gap, performed amid freestanding, shaped paintings reminiscent of classical Greek sculpture. Each was painted with short vertical marks in saturated colors. As the performance began, the dancers were hiding behind the paintings, but, as the dance unfolded, they began to transfer bits of the color from the paintings to their costumes, as if they were blank canvases in the process of being painted. The process also might have intimated the blossoming and consolidation that romance can precipitate...

This Spring, Norte Maar brings forth CounterPointe 7, a collaboration between six female dance makers and six female visual artists. The performances will take place at downtown Brooklyn’s Actors Fund Arts Center from April 26-28. Tickets here.

Counterpointe is produced by Norte Maar in collaboration with the Brooklyn Ballet.

Dallas Art Fair with David B. Smith Gallery
April 11-14, 2019
Fashion Industry Gallery, 1807 Ross Avenue, Dallas, TX

"Review: Two Solos Show Patterned Play at David B. Smith" by Michael Paglia in Westword, March 7, 2019

Excerpt:

...Installation view of Justine Hill: Bookends.Courtesy of David B. Smith Gallery
In the intimate back gallery is Justine Hill: Bookends. The wall facing the entry has been covered in a rough pattern of spray paint done graffiti-style; on this hang three of Justine Hill’s idiosyncratic abstracts done on shaped panels of heroic complexity. The cuts used to make the shapes of these panels follow the contours of the imagery; in places, there are voids piercing the panels, revealing the wall behind. The abstract forms have been blown up and crudely formed in these works. As a result, the pictorial imagery reads more like a clutch of parodies of painterly marks rather than exemplifying straightforward mark-making.

Hill has written that the paintings “are creatures with their own quirky and complex stories,” but she does not reveal what those stories are. Oddly enough, they don’t appear to be figural at all, but seem to be more landscape-based...

Bookends
David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, CO
February 15 - March 16, 2019

PRESS RELEASE

Returning for her first solo exhibition with David B. Smith Gallery, New York based artist Justine Hill continues her dialog with abstracted landscapes.

Presented in the gallery’s project room, Bookends tests the boundaries of the rectangular canvas, challenging what Hill views as the three classic component parts of paintings: figure, landscape, and background. Identified as independent from one another yet essential to the whole, the perimeter of each element is both distanced and linked by negative space. Eluding containment, occasionally spilling onto walls and across channels, Hill’s energetic figures and marks defy the stability of the loose rectangles that strive to contain them.

Each piece in Bookends has three primary elements that pull together to prop up the whole as a sturdy, self-sufficient work. The literary concepts of beginning, middle, and end are likened to the figure, landscape, and background, with each fulfilling a singular assigned role. Boundary is playfully stretched and distorted with bursts of colors and movement in Hill’s enigmatic trio of works, blurring the elemental structures of painting and marking the next chapter in her investigation of landscape.

Beirut Art Fair with Artual Gallery

September 20-23, 2018
"Seaside Arena" HALL 3 at the Beirut New Waterfront
Beirut, Lebanon

Review of "Freestanding" by Elizabeth Buhe in Art in America, June/July Issue 2018

Excerpt:

....Hill exhibits an easy-seeming confidence, both in her exuberant facture and in her engagement with art history. Her work evokes that of Pierre Bonnard, Elizabeth Murray, Frank Stella, Pablo Picasso, Brice Marden, and various other predecessors, but manages to be wholly its own thing. Its surface patterning and formal maneuvering put Hill on par with a number of artists currently represented in the Museum of Art and Design’s “Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro,” which examines the feminist pioneer’s legacy and presents a history of craft, decoration, and abstraction in which Hill’s eccentric, high-spirited works certainly belong.

Posted: July 9, 2018

Excerpt:

...We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
To start with, I make paintings. I make paintings on shapes which I cut out of plywood, wrap with canvas and then “paint” with acrylics, pastels, color pencils, markers and crayons. I specify this, first off, because I get asked all the time, but secondly, because the physically of art is extremely important. I spend a tremendous amount of time considering how things I make and things other people make exist in space – their scale, their materials, their weight, etc...

Surface of a Sphere
Klowden Mann, Los Angeles, CA
Curated by Daniel Gerwin
July 13 - August 25, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, July 13th 6-8pm

Loren Britton
Martha Clippinger
Daniel Gerwin
Justine Hill
Tomashi Jackson
Nick Kramer
Fabienne Lasserre
David Lloyd
Becca Lowry
Cordy Ryman
Rachel Eulena Williams

Group show: EDDYSROOM
Useable Space, Milwaukee, WI
Opening Reception: Friday, June 29th

Group show: Techno Abstractions
CORE: Club, New York, NY
May 27 - August 31, 2018
Reception: Tuesday, June 26, 2018, 6-8pm

Featuring the work of Devra Freeman, Eliot Greenwald, Grant Stoops, Justine Hill & Norma Markley, Techno Abstractions brings together five artists to create a visual vibration of saturated color and gesture. Bridging a multitude of complex surfaces, this exhibition unlocks a collision of color and untamed visual indulgence. The exhibit is curated by Natalie Kates and Amanda Uribe of Latch Key Gallery.

Freestanding at Denny Gallery
Opening reception Thursday, March, 29th 6-8pm
March 29 - May 6, 2018

Denny Gallery is pleased to announce Freestanding, a solo exhibition by Justine Hill on view from March 29th to May 6th, 2018. This is her second solo exhibition with Denny Gallery following They Just Behave Differently in 2016.

Freestanding shows Hill’s development of the “Cutouts,” a body of work she began in 2015. The Cutouts are paintings on hand-cut wood panels covered with canvas, which hang a few inches off the wall. They often consist of multiple panels, which configured together, make up a singular work. Hill begins her process by designing her shapes. In this phase, she determines how the separate panels will interact with one another and what role they will have within the composition, as some panels now take on the role of an object within the composition, or a ground or background component. She also chooses the scale of the pieces, considering material issues of strength and weight of the panels. She then cuts the panels in her studio and wraps them with canvas. Painting is the second stage, and while reacting to the constraints of the shapes she has created, she has also greatly developed the complexity of mark-making in her paintings and how the composition works across the panels.

Since her first exhibition, Hill has been investigating deeply the formal constraints of her Cutout format. When the painting declared its own object-hood by coming off the wall and acquiring organic shape, the artist felt that it relegated the space around it to a background environment, and that she ceded control of that space and the relationship between her works within it. Hill has since been exploring how the painting could reassert itself in space, reacquire its background, and become “freestanding”. This conceptual progression can be found in works such as the Bookends series and her larger landscape works, which incorporate elements of figure and ground within them.

Hill’s multi-panel compositions no longer function as puzzle pieces, but instead as dazzling exercises in positive and negative space. The painting phase has allowed additional exploration as compositions spread across panels or stop firmly at the borders. Each painting seems bound by an increasingly demanding set of rules from the one prior, as Hill continues to challenge the paintings to live up to the shapes she has created for them.

NADA New York with Denny Gallery

March 8-11, 2018
Skylight Clarkson Sq, 550 Washington St, New York, NY 10014

Artists Featured:
Justine Hill, Amanda Valdez & Emily Noelle Lambert

Movers And Shapers
Opening Friday, January 12 at Victori + Mo, 6 pm to 9 pm. On view through February 18.

It is generally understood that to get paint into any sort of shape at all, you have to move it in some way. While yes, technically everyone who paints does that, Brooklyn-based artist Justine Hill and LA-based artist Ali Silverstein are particularly focused on the act of moving and shaping paint. The exhibition is simultaneously a bicoastal collaboration and the results of one artist inspiring the other, which are two things that can arguably be deemed one and the same. Hill encountered Silverstein’s work at an art fair, and began following her work, centered around bold brushstrokes and canvases that are cut into their own designs. Hill’s work is similar but different, more detailed and controlled than bold and free, but still valuing shape and cut-out imagery. Pay the gallery a visit, and see if you can track who influenced who, and how.

Robert Burnier & Justine Hill
David B. Smith Gallery, Denver, Colorado
January 19 - February 24, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, January 19th 6-8pm

Featuring work from Chicago-based artist Robert Burnier, and New York-based artist Justine Hill in the main gallery, David B. Smith Gallery is proud to present a two-person exhibition of artists working across media, across the country.

Robert Burnier’s folded and twisted aluminum wall sculptures draw attention to spatial relationships and corresponding visual language, with meaning inadvertently following form. Each of Burnier’s works are titled in the manufactured utopian language Esperanto, which was conceived in the late 19th century in what is now Poland, in order to create a universal linguistic bridge between peoples. Materiality, manipulation, and chance come together in Burnier’s work, presenting both question and axiom.

The line between landscape and figure, painting and collage, foreground and background is crossed over and back again in Justine Hill’s enigmatic works. Hill’s irregularly shaped canvases burst with colors and textures, emphasizing gesture and intuitive mark making. Occupying a fluctuating space between loose representation and pure abstraction, Hill’s mixed media paintings act individualistically as distinct characters.

Together Burnier and Hill bring new takes on color, form, texture, and dimension to the main gallery. Contrast and convergence underscore chance relationships between works, where shapes and shadow echo and mimic one another, moving forward and back through layers and spaces, never seeking or arriving at a conclusion.

Movers and Shapers
Justine Hill & Ali Silverstein
Victori + Mo, Brooklyn, NY
January 11 - February 18, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, January 12th, 6-9pm

December 14, 2017 (New York, NY) - VICTORI + MO is pleased to announce Movers and Shapers, a dual exhibition of new works from New York-based painter Justine Hill and her Los Angeles contemporary Ali Silverstein. The exhibition, which marks the debut of both artists with the gallery, opens on January 5th and will remain on view through February 18th.

Justine Hill was first introduced to Ali Silverstein's work in 2015, at Untitled Art Fair, Miami. Hill admired Silverstein's handling of materials, particularly the pronounced extemporaneous brushstrokes upon large-scale cut-out canvases. She continued to follow Silverstein's practice through social media, which influenced her own work, primarily the mark-making upon her abstracted landscape paintings.

Silverstein is a painter whose primary focus strays definitively from the traditional considerations of painting,and instead uses paint as a method and material to explore the concepts that she considers the foundation of her practice: spontaneous gesture, desire, and decision-making.

She identifies a kinship with the romantic perspective of art critic, Harold Rosenberg, and the idea of the canvas as less of a means of representation but rather an extension of the uninhibited mind. The making of her paintings is intensely physical, not necessarily a formal performance but certainly a result of a series of present-moment gestural expressions manifest of the instinctual desires of the body. To that end, Silverstein uses unorthodox brushes, such as century-old brooms, as a means to create a vastly different approach to mark-making, which introduces wholly unique gestures into the work. The new paintings merge the impulsive gestural reaction with the figuration of her earlier work, further blurring the line between the abstract and the representational. Hung away from the gallery wall, the works purposefully resemble wall hangings, curtains and layered drapes more than paintings, an intentional referent to the physical and decorative objects commonly associated with domesticity.

Unlike the unpremeditated work of Silverstein, Hill's paintings are created within a narrower set of guidelines. Prior to beginning a piece, Hill clearly defines the scale, shape and structure of each painting by building the structure which acts as her control element. The painting then develops with the back and forth assistance of sketching on the computer. Hill's work is fundamentally interested in the act of mark-making, and how the composite of these varied marks (paint, crayon, pencil, or pastel) coalesce into a final painting.

With her latest paintings, Hill explores the dialogue between figuration and landscape, the relational interplay between foreground and background, and the question of visual importance. The cut-outs, constructed from wood into irregular shapes and then covered in canvas, confer dominance to the figure form/foreground. These non-rectangular pieces serve to personify the painting, which may bear a resemblance to an animated creature or moving environment, depending on their formation. In order to exaggerate the wall plane, for the first time Hill adheres the cut-out shapes to a rectangle, a torn unstretched canvas backdrop which rests against the gallery wall.

While Hill's process of carefully considered studies and Silverstein's spontaneous physicality are distinct, the finished works share many associative traits. It may have been the gestured mark that attracted Hill to Silverstein’s work in the first place, but their interest in creating physical depth and objecthood and their shared method of cutting out and collaging to make a whole are essential elements in both practices. The title Mover and Shapers refers to many of these overlapping traits. While Silverstein’s work evolves more in the “moving,” and Hill’s work is decided more in the “shaping,” the combination is necessary.

Pace Gallery remembers Elizabeth Murray with show of her 1980s work
The Art Newspaper
By: Pac Pobric | November 2, 2017

..."For the younger painter Justine Hill, what stands out about Murray is the deliberateness of her style. “She’s able to make the cut-out shapes seem necessary, as if she didn’t need what was around them,” Hill says.

Although she stresses that her work is different from Murray’s—“I feel like I’m really concerned with mark-making, whereas she was wonderful at moulding forms physically”—Hill says she’s drawn to the simplicity with which Murray described her work. “There didn’t have to be this long, drawn-out art-historical conversation about why something should be” in a painting, Hill says."...

Small Painting - Group Exhibition
February 10 - March 6, 2017
COUNTY, Palm Beach, FL

Artists: John Phillip Abbott, Samantha Bittman, Tyler Brandon, Michael Dotson, Sarah Faux, Ruth Freeman, Pam Glick, Charlotte Hallberg, Justine Hill, Pamela Jorden, Stephen Maine, Allison Miller, Danielle Mysliwiec, Dana Powell, Jason Stoppa, Jennifer Sullivan, Anne Vieux, Wendy White, Brian Willmont

Exhibiting at UNTITLED. San Francisco Art Fair with Denny Gallery
January 13-15, 2017

Artists: Russell Tyler, Erin O'Keefe & Justine Hill

More details on Denny Gallery's website and UNTITLED.'s website.

Artist residency at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA in December 2016. Link

The 13 Best Booths at UNTITLED, Miami Beach
Artsy
By: Molly Gottschalk | November 30, 2016

Denny Gallery
Artists: Justine Hill, Nikolai Ishchuk, Caris Reid

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP
Tangles of abstract shapes by 30-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist Justine Hill dot two walls of Denny Gallery’s booth. Suggesting hybrids of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray, they embrace the history of abstraction—but sketched on the computer and brought back to canvas with a contemporary update. They are priced between $3,500 and $14,000, and, as of Tuesday afternoon, two have sold.

10 of the Best New Artists at the Untitled Art Fair
Artspace
By: Andrew M. Goldstein | November 30, 2016

JUSTINE HILL
Denny Gallery – New York
Inspired by the art of Elizabeth Murray and Frank Stella, the Brooklyn-based painter Justine Hill creates vibrant compositions of shaped canvases—the kind of décor-inclined, art-history-sampling work that Untitled excels at. What makes Hill a bit of an update on her aesthetic forebears is her careful, digitally enabled technique: she starts by making a drawing, then cuts sheets of plywood into shapes that match her sketch, then photographs the result so she can test out different painting strategies virtually before actually committing them to the brush. The results, which carry over the appealing cleanliness of their computerized process, have now won her a residency at MASS MoCA.

50 Must-See Artworks at UNTITLED, Art Miami, NADA, PULSE, and More
Artsy
By: Alexxa Gotthardt
November 26, 2016

Exhibiting at UNTITLED. Miami Beach Art Fair with Denny Gallery
November 30 - December 4, 2016

Artists: Justine Hill, Nikolai Ishchuk & Caris Reid

View more on Denny Gallery and UNTITLED.

The City & The City included in "9 Must-See Summer 2016 Group Gallery Shows" in artnet news
By: Eileen Kinsella
June 30, 2016

The City & The City - Group Exhibition
June 29 - August 19, 2016
Denny Gallery POP UP, 150 East Broadway, New York, NY

Artists: Trudy Benson, John Dante Bianchi, Michael Flomen, Ghost of a Dream, Nicolas Grenier, Justine Hill, Erin O’Keefe, Caris Reid, Jordan Tate, Russell Tyler, and Amanda Valdez

15 New York Gallery Shows Where You’ll Find Exciting Young Artists This June
Artsy
By: Casey Lesser
June 2, 2016

...The young Brooklyn-based artist presents a new group of paintings made from sheets of plywood that she cuts into organic shapes and covers in canvas, from an ongoing series she’s dubbed “cut outs.” Hill’s approach to painting—layering lines, shapes, and swathes of color—is informed by traditions of collage as well as digital artmaking tools. Her works, which playfully dot the gallery walls, strike a balance between levity and precision...

To Do: May 18–June 1, 2016
Twenty-five things to see, hear, watch, and read
New York Magazine
May 15, 2016

Art
24. See They Just Behave Differently
Justine Hill’s colorful world.
Justine Hill’s Stella-esque works — animated, irregularly shaped canvases of sidewalk-chalk-colored shapes — actually comprise several panels carefully puzzled together. They’re human-scale works you can live with, given the perfect stage at this intimate gallery.
Denny Gallery, through June 30.

Interview with Sharon Butler on Two Coats of Paint
May 13, 2016

They Just Behave Differently
May 19 - June 30, 2016
Opening reception: Thursday, May 19th, 6-8pm, Facebook event invite.
Denny Gallery, New York, NY

Press Release

Denny Gallery is pleased to announce They Just Behave Differently, a solo exhibition by Justine Hill on view from May 19th to June 30th, 2016.

They Just Behave Differently is Hill’s first solo exhibition at Denny Gallery, following her debut with the gallery in the group exhibition, Metamodern, in 2015. That exhibition theorized that she is part of a distinct contemporary moment by oscillating between modern and postmodern tendencies- expressing both humor and seriousness, enthusiasm and irony, play and discipline.

Justine Hill makes abstract paintings using elemental marks and shapes that are distinguished by color, value, and opacity. Her process is to add layers, alluding both to digital painting tools and to collage. Hill makes traditional rectangular paintings and shaped canvases she calls “Cut Outs,” which are reminiscent of Elizabeth Murray, Frank Stella, and a heterogeneous set of contemporaries. The Cut Outs are first constructed in wood that Hill cuts down into various shapes and covers with canvas. She then paints the forms on the canvas while navigating their relationship to the bounding shape, its shadows, and its space in the real world. The artist personifies the Cut Outs, even more so than the rectangular paintings. Their animus led her to respond to the question of what distinguishes them from her rectangular paintings by saying, “They just behave differently.”

Justine Hill (b. 1985, Tarrytown, NY) received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from the College of the Holy Cross. She has had solo exhibitions at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (New York) and Galerie Protégé (New York), and has exhibited work in Bridgehampton, Miami and New York City in several critically acclaimed group exhibitions, including Metamodern at Denny Gallery and Immediate Female at Judith Charles Gallery. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The Observer, Arte Fuse, On Verge, and the Huffington Post, which named her one of “Four Contemporary Female Artists Who Are Shaping The Future Of Painting” in 2013 and one of “10 Badass Emerging Female Artist You Should Know” in 2015.

"Painter Painting" at Union Docs
Brooklyn, NY
January 28, 2016

Evening curated by Steve MacfarIane and Phil Coldiron

The evening began with a screening of Hart Perry’s 1969 portrait of Grace Hartigan, followed by a screening of Emile de Antonio's 1973 film Painters Painting.

Concluding with a panel moderated by Mary Potter, curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art; including artists: Catherine Pearson & Justine Hill.

Hyperallergic
Going Meta: Art after the Death of Art, by: Thomas Micchelli
August 22, 2015

"...Justine Hill’s “Paper Doll 3 (Tiki)” (2015) required not just a good deal of forethought but also a disciplined application of craft, shaping a wood panel into a ragged ovoid before wrapping it in canvas and applying acrylic, pastel and pencil. Although the surface is a riot of lines and abstract shapes, there is something somber about this work when compared with the more carefree shaped canvases of Elizabeth Murray — a difference that feels particularly emblematic of the 21st-century conceptual divide that these artists have crossed.

It is as if Hill has adopted the raucous format upon which Murray unleashed her pop-culture references, but takes instead a more formal approach, line as line, shape as shape. Like the other painters in the show, Hill assumes an appropriately meta attitude to the aesthetic tools she’s inherited, interrogating and repurposing them with a self-consciousness that allows for reflexivity while shutting the door (or perhaps leaving it slightly ajar) on irony..."

On-Verge.com
Metamodernism, by: Kristi Arnold
August 19, 2015

"...Justine Hill’s painting, Paper Doll 3 (Tiki), is both painterly and sculptural. Resembling an abstracted or warped speech bubble, the canvas breaks free of the traditional landscape/portrait format, recalling Elizabeth Murray’s vibrant and funky-shaped canvases. However, in Hill’s painting, the colors are muted and the shapes pile on top of one another. The space is claustrophobic. And yet this space works. Energetic lines that circle and weave in front of and behind collage-like shapes seem to have been made in a frenzy, leaving little room for mistakes, only an intuitive reaction to the marks already on the surface. At the same time, the squiggle-like blue line that lays on top of the majority of the painting is reminiscent of digital marks made through computer programs such as the brush tool in Photoshop, a technique that remains prominent in contemporary painting today..."

Metamodern
July 16 - August 29, 2015
Denny Gallery, New York, NY

The Huffington Post
10 Badass Emerging Female Artists You Should Know, by: Priscilla Frank
January 22, 2015

Made In New York - projectspace
February 12 - March 26, 2015
Blueshift Project, Miami, FL

Immediate Female - Group Exhibition
January 25 - March 8, 2015
Judith Charles Gallery, New York, NY

Vermont Studio Center
Johnson, VT
February 2015

Widewalls
Immediate Female at Judith Charles
By: Steve Gray
January 18, 2015

Hamptons Art Hub
ART REVIEW: At Kathryn Markel, a Window into Abstraction & Non-Figurative Approaches
By: Eric Ernst
June 14, 2014

Pick-and-Place - Solo Exhibition
June 26 - August 29, 2014
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
New York, NY

Arte Fuse
Boxed in Plastics by Justine Hill at Galerie Protégé
By: Jamie Martinez
May 1, 2014

Arte Fuse
Interview with Artist Justine Hill
By: Jamie Martinez
April 23, 2014

Boxed in Plastics - Solo Exhibition
April 17 - May 17, 2014
Galerie Protege
New York, NY

The Huffington Post
4 Contemporary Female Artists Who Are Shaping The Future Of Painting
By: Priscilla Frank
December 19, 2013

Currently Untitled - Group Exhibition
November 21, 2014 - January 4, 2014
Galerie Protege
New York, NY

Hamptons Art Hub
“Everything Has Its Place” at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
By: Pat Rogers
June 13, 2013

Everything has its Place - Group Exhibition
June 1 - June 19, 2013
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
Bridgehampton, NY

Pulse Magazine
04.13 Cantor Art Gallery to Present 'Spark: A Celebration of Alumnae Artists' form Holy Cross'
April 2, 2013

Spark: A Celebration of Alumnae Artists from Holy Cross - Group Exhibition
March 14 - April 12, 2013
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery
College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, MA

New York Observer
‘No More Rock Stars’ at Galerie Protégé
By: Will Heinrich
January 8, 2013

No More Rock Stars - Group Exhibition
January 3 - January 31, 2013
Galerie Protege
New York, NY