Hilary Wilder

Hilary Wilder, Violet in Rome (Rocks and Bullets), oil, acrylic and embroidery wool on canvas, 40" x 30", 2019.

Hilary Wilder is an American visual artist and educator based in Richmond, Virginia. She is primarily known for painting and installation art, but has also worked in sculpture and video. Her art employs wide-ranging, familiar visual languages—for example, from landscape and abstract painting and modern design—to explore how personal experience, historical events and places are represented, and sometimes fictionalized, misunderstood or idealized.

Wilder's work has been recognized by the John S. Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner foundations and belongs to the public art collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). She has exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, MFAH and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, among other venues.

Biography and career Wilder studied art at Bates College in Maine and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she earned an MFA in 2001. The Suburban (2010, Oak Park, IL),

Wilder is a professor in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she has taught since 2007.

Work and reception Wilder's paintings, installations and sculptures are often characterized by a central tension between representation and abstraction—for example, mixing elements of the picturesque 19th-century Romantic style and the modernist abstract grid—that signals competing impulses of a human desire for order and the chaos of the cosmos.

In earlier paintings, Wilder created images of manmade and natural disasters, employing the sublime language of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner and the Hudson River School. Wilder's impermanent, site-specific installations offered a similar critique, revealing the "naturalness" of representational painting as a construction by incorporating on-site architectural elements (walls, electrical sockets) as compositional elements or spilling contents onto the floor.

Specific artworks and exhibitions Wilder's landscape-based work in the 2000s often focused critically on constructed moments of transformation, revealing disparities between representations of catastrophes and the profound upheaval they caused, events and memory. Her exhibition "Ornament and Crime" (2010) used a 1909 essay by architect Adolph Loos condemning the use of ornamentation as "degenerate" as a touchstone; its work combining bold pattern, minimal forms and mass-produced materials was described in Artlies as "a clever, wistful commentary on the battles once waged over art and ornament" (e.g., An Immodern Proposal #1 and 2).

Wilder's later painting took on a more fractured, collage-like appearance, juxtaposing images of nature, abstract pattern, trompe l'oeil effects and multiple views. In her 2019 exhibition, "They Bring Flowers," she presented paintings inspired by narratives drawn from 20th-century architecture, world history, art and mythology—each of which described an encounter between a woman and a specific system or individual that aimed to diminish her (e.g., Violet in Rome (Rocks and Bullets), 2019). She has received artist residencies from Cow House Studios (Ireland), Galveston Artist Residency, the Ingmar Bergman Estate (Sweden), Jentel Arts, NES Artist Residency (Iceland) and Ucross Foundation. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and U.S. Department of State.

Her videos were screened at the Pacific Film Archive and Chicago International Film Festival, where she was awarded its Gold Plaque in the experimental short video category in 2001.