Hilary Wilder

[4][5][6] 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.

[19] 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.

[1][7] Reviewers suggest that despite their atmospherics and complex brushwork, these apocalyptic images registered skepticism for such idealized visions through subtle formal disruptions and insertions of graphic shapes, irregular grids, decorative patterns and historical motifs.

[2][17][12][22] 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.

[1][4][5] Art Papers critic Michelle White wrote, ""For Wilder, the formal and conceptual contradictions posed by the landscape are therefore the perfect tools to question the meaning of place and the dissonance that occurs when the real stumbles upon the ideal.

[18][22][25] 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).