Born 1985, Tarrytown, NY. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
(she/her/hers)
Justine Hill’s work explores the boundaries of abstract painting with her unique approach to form and mark making. She styles her paintings on shaped wood panels wrapped in canvas. Hill began to work with this process in 2015 when she was questioning the circumscribed boundary of the single rectangle for a painting. The way Hill chooses to arrange the pieces, how the shapes relate to one another, and the negative spaces within and around them, are all essential to the work.
Hill received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from the College of the Holy Cross. Hill’s most recent solo exhibitions were Alternates at MAKI Gallery in Tokyo (2021), and Touch at Denny Dimin Gallery (2020). Hill’s other recent exhibitions include Fringe at Denny Dimin Gallery (2021), Fanfare at Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery (2020), Bookends at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver (2019), and Backdrops at Art-in-Buildings in New York (2019). In 2022, Hill was commissioned by the College of the Holy Cross for a monumental site-specific painting for their new Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Window. In 2019, she collaborated on a ballet duet titled Shapeshifters with choreographer Michelle Thompson Ulerich organized by Norte Maar in Brooklyn. Her work is in significant collections including The Davis Museum (Wellesley, MA) and The Columbus Metropolitan Library (Columbus, OH), among others. Her work has been reviewed or featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, and The Art Newspaper.
“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.
As the city reopened, the art world saw legacy-changing donations for the Met and the Brooklyn Museum, and a seismic shift in Tribeca’s gallery scene.
This very connection between the past and present prompted the Denny Dimin Gallery in Manhattan to organize the ongoing group exhibition, “Fringe.”
A more intimate and entirely irresistible group show—cleverly titled “Fringe”—is on view at the Denny Dimin gallery through Aug. 20.
“Many artists in Denny Dimin Gallery’s program have been significantly influenced by the movement…I also wanted to explore how some artists have complicated the gender identities of craft and how artists of diverse backgrounds have brought other important histories into their work, enriching the dialogue around the ideas of P & D.”
“The dining room didn’t have a lot of natural light—it’s kind of a gray box. So we said, let’s do neon,” Rockwell explains of the space…The artwork by Justine Hill pulls it all together.
Justine Hill makes more with less in her multipart abstract paintings; Kevin Beasley mixes the political with the personal in “Reunion.”
Read on The New York Times.
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.
Justine Hill’s New Show of Sculptural Paintings Is a Timely Homage to the Importance of Touch
Cultured Magazine invited Justine Hill to shoot a virtual studio visit of her new studio to preview work for her upcoming exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York this fall.
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.
International Women’s Day was observed when the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley, one of the first colleges for women in the US, acquired two works from New York’s Denny Gallery, Drunkard’s Path, an embroidered and quilted piece by Amanda Valdez, and a new four-panel painting by Justine Hill called Figure, Ground, Background 2.
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.
The twisting and skewing of her [Elizabeth Murray] paintings would eventually introduce a three-dimensionality that opened a new space for painting. An important influence we can see in contemporary painters like Ruth Root and Justine Hill.
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.
Read on on Artsy “15 New York Gallery Shows Where You’ll Find Exciting Young Artists This June” Artsy Editorial 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,…Read More
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.
Read on Two Coats of Paint. Interview: Justine Hill in Bushwick By: Sharon Butler, May 13, 2016 I first saw Justine Hill’s paintings in “Metamodern,” a 2015 group show at Denny Gallery that explored the contemporary fusion of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Primitivism. Her shaped canvases seem to jump off the wall with their unexpected amalgamation of Modern abstraction, postmodern humor, and the uninhibited brio of old-school graffiti taggers. In a recent studio visit, Hill shared work that she’s making for her forthcoming…Read More
Read on Hyperallergic Going Meta: Art after the Death of Art by Thomas Micchelli, August 22, 2015 Terminology is slippery, and using it as the premise for an exhibition can be slipperier still (witness the Museum of Modern Art’s recent stumble with “atemporality” in The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World). But the concept underlying Metamodern, a group show at Denny Gallery on the Lower East Side, actually holds the potential to enrich an already strong array of works…Read More
“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 June 2023.
Conversation about Justine Hill: Touch at Denny Dimin Gallery in 2020.
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.
Created for CounterPointe7
Organized by Norte Maar
Length: 7 minutes 20 seconds
Performed at the Actors Fund Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, April 26th, 27th and 28th, 2019
Choreography: Michelle Thompson Ulerich
Art/Design: Justine Hill
Performers: Andy Zhao and Catherine Gurr
Music: Colin Rose
