STILL LIVES: Bella Foster & Blair Saxon-Hill 

Shanghai—Pearl Lam Galleries is delighted to announce the upcoming duo exhibition Still Lives, featuring works by Bella Foster and Blair Saxon-Hill. Still Lives highlights the evolving nature of still life painting, emphasising individual expression and emotional depth. The two California-based female artists bring new perspectives to these traditional genres, using everyday fragments and serendipity as their subjects to celebrate what our lives have to offer. By embracing the everyday, their direct painting approaches allow them to create intimate visual realities. Influenced by modernism, their revisionist approaches towards colour and surface treatment are personal yet independent of the objects they depict. The subdued style of their paintings creates a sense of stillness or a reverse gaze to entice beholders to form psychological attachments with the artwork on view. This reciprocal approach resonates with late Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi’s idea of valuing moods above all else, merging shapes into abstract images to evoke tranquillity and privacy.

Bella Foster’s artistic practice centres on still lifes that intimately depict the spaces of her friends and her own, blending real and imagined domestic environments. Her paintings transcend mere representation, engaging in a psychological inquiry into the intersubjective experiences that shape our connection to the objects within these spaces. Through her lens, the seemingly mundane transforms into a poignant exploration of solitude and desolation, revealing a world beyond material objects where we find meaning and spiritual sustenance. Drawing inspiration from artists like Pierre Bonnard and Georgia O’Keeffe, Foster employs a distinctive economy of colour hues that conveys a flat picture plane, foreshortening our reading of the artworks with rhythm and repetition. Far from mere depictions of ordinary scenes, Foster’s works are not meant to reflect on spaces or objects we desire to own, but rather the deeper meaning embodied by them, presenting unexpected juxtapositions that challenge conventional notions of the still life genre. Ultimately, her paintings animate stillness, transforming quotidian objects into profound inquiries of human psychology and materiality. 

Blair Saxon-Hill is a multidisciplinary artist now working primarily in oil painting. She states, “I have created a series of flower still life paintings; at times, an imaginary scene is drawn around the still life and at others, the flowers take centre stage. I am interested in a notational approach to mark making.” Taking advantage of her downtown Los Angeles studio, which is near the flower market, Saxon-Hill has an observational still life practice. After gathering flowers from the market, she returns to the studio to compose bouquets and paint them from life. Sometimes, these same still life bouquets are inserted into her paintings of imagined scenes, thereby combining her two working methods: observational painting and relaying images from her imagination. Less interested in capturing the exactitudes of the specific flower types or light, the artist prefers to emphasise the overall composition and relationships of shapes and lines, aiming for a kind of descriptive whimsy. Given the scale of her paintings in relation to the human body, the flowers signify different forms of figuration and moods. Her works engage in complex colour games reminiscent of Matisse that challenge conventional expectations, creating a vibrant palette steeped with emotional nuances. In some of her paintings, flowers become moody, consciously reflecting back to viewers their own experiences and emotions. Saxon-Hill choreographs her characters into psychological engagements that express a longing for connection. Influenced by the CoBrA art movement, she melds figuration and abstraction to create an ever-expanding cast of imagined characters. In short, Saxon-Hill’s paintings celebrate love, sincerity, and the beauty found in everyday life.