As part of the Kabinett sector at this year’s Art Basel, P·P·O·W is pleased to present three new paintings by Hilary Harkness. 

In her meticulously rendered small-scale paintings, Harkness fuses traditional techniques with a distinctly contemporary sensibility to explore power struggles inherent in sex, race, and class systems. Working in episodic series that take years to complete, Harkness wields unparalleled skill and imagination to elevate the stories and intersectional experiences of women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ people. In one of the featured paintings, Moses, 2026, Harkness depicts contemporary artist Moses Leonardo posing as one of Harkness’s beloved protagonists, Arabella Freeman, a fictitious Civil War Era Virginian who is free, landowning, and prosperous, imagining what real power looks like in our contemporary age. 

Hilary Harkness (b. 1971) earned her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; and Seavest Collection, New York, NY; among others. In 2017, she received the Henry Clews Award and participated in the inaugural Master Residency Program at the Château de La Napoule, France. She has lectured widely at leading academic and cultural institutions. In 2014, she co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY. Harkness’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Prisoners from the Front, was on display in Fall 2023. In 2024, Black Dog Press and P·P·O·W co-published Hilary Harkness: Everything for You, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, featuring texts by Lynne Tillman, Dr. Ashley Jackson, as well as an interview with American painter Ivy Haldeman. Hilary's work is currently featured in the group exhibition Matisse's Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, accompanied by a catalog published by Delmonico Books.