In Stephanie Temma Hier’s Surrealist Still Lives, Nature Takes Over

Arguably, the anxiety of influence plagues painters more than it does other makers. Or at least they are the ones who complain about it most. This means that plenty of painters prove nerdy about art history, conversing with the dead through a hodgepodge of shared references or trying to find a clever way to break free of the baggage.

The best painters do a bit of both, as in work by next-gen star Stephanie Temma Hier. Her colorful still lives are indebted to the Dutch, but go light on the drama. And they brim with Surrealist motifs: mollusks and crustaceans, rotary phones and Belgian endives. It often feels as if nature is taking over in her work: bringing the natural realm indoors, she gives us a kind of Art Nouveau for the Anthropocene. But this isn’t decorative wallpaper, the stakes are high. Art Nouveau, after all, emerged as the nascent Industrial Revolution began to sever human connection to the environment. Hier’s ceramic vegetables—vibrant but, with their glossy sheen, obviously dead—beg the question: is it too late for us to try and reconnect?
The artist likes that all these references—and existential questions—are part of the work, forming an evocative, absurdist swirl of attraction and repulsion, exuberance and ennui: “Rather than starting out with some thesis,” she said, “the works reveal themselves to me over time.” Hier, whose process tends toward the spontaneous, insists on ambiguity, warning that “when art has a distinct narrative, it feels like it could be propaganda.” Paraphrasing some of the original Surrealists, she added: “in an absurd world, the only sane response is Surrealism,” a principle as relevant now as then.

The painterly references are all there, loaded up; by fusing them with sculptural elements, Hier breaks free from their weight. To carve out her own vocabulary, she begins her paintings in a manner it is tempting to describe as backward, often starting with the frame, of all things. At first, she wanted her paintings to “jump off the wall.” Soon, her frames began to dispense with the tyrannical form of the rectangle. In the rare case when you can find four flush corners at the edges of her works, they tend to come from frame-like structures comprising neatly arranged, intricately crafted replicas of natural forms: rows of strawberries, carrots, eggs, or teeth. Hier makes the familiar seem totally bizarre, in the hope that you might begin to question the ordinary things all around you—the status quo—and start to embrace, in her words, “the strangeness of life.”

Hier adores her spacious studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she works almost every day with a small dog named Daphne. “I’ll just sit here for 10 hours and, like, sculpt snails, as if in a trance,” she said. She builds almost everything by hand, with no molds. Over time, her ceramic forms have taken on more and more primacy. Last year, she bought a kiln bigger than her own body, and this has allowed nature to spill over even more emphatically into sculptural dimensions.

The work in Hier’s solo show this past spring at Gallery Vacancy in Shanghai delved into the domestic realm: cheese graters, mops, and vintage TVs merged with animals and plants. In one piece, Mornings at home with myself (2024), rectangular paintings comprise the planes of a sculpted ceramic stove: one side depicts an eerie, pinkish snake, but the oven’s vintage vibe makes it all feel nostalgic, even comforting. The oven isn’t functional but, rather, fictional. As for the green ceramic fish that dispenses toilet paper in her studio bathroom? That’s another story.