Bella Foster

January 17 - March 5, 2026

The Pit is pleased to present Flowers and Mushrooms, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Grass Valley, California–based artist Bella Foster, her fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view January 17 - March 5, 2026 with an opening reception on January 17 from 5-7pm.

Known for her luminous interiors and intimate still lifes, Foster captures the magic of ordinary spaces and objects with rare tenderness. Her works invite viewers into a world where the familiar becomes radiant, and where the act of painting itself becomes a form of contemplation and care. Over the past two decades, Foster has developed a singular practice grounded in drawing, watercolor, and acrylic painting. She is known for her ability to merge humor, warmth, and a painter’s devotion to beauty into a cohesive, resonant vision. Foster’s practice centers on observation and imagination in equal measure. Often depicting domestic interiors, gardens, or the studios of friends, her compositions become gentle portraits of places inhabited by memory and feeling. Each painting is a meditation on color, light, and form—a reflection of how art can turn the simplest scene into a site of wonder. Drawing on the legacies of modernism, literature, and myth, Foster’s works extend beyond the visible world, creating spaces that feel at once personal and universal, tender and transcendent.

In Flowers and Mushrooms, Foster continues her exploration of painting’s capacity to hold emotion and spirit within material form. The title itself suggests growth, transformation, and the natural cycles that underlie both art and life. One of the works, Jon and Chel’s Garden, 2024 particularly captures this duality with tender precision. The painting depicts a garden of sunflowers in full radiance, their golden faces turned toward the light. Painted from a view of her friends’ sunflower patch, the work conveys not only the vitality of the flowers themselves, but also the affection and friendship that inspired the scene. It is emblematic of Foster’s ability to transform simple observation into communion with nature, with others, and with the act of painting itself. Her bookshelf paintings contain paraphernalia from friend’s and icon’s homes – books of war illustrated with the mushroom cloud of nuclear bombs, “The Autobiography of a Yogi” written by the guru who began the self-realization center in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, and Ray Bradbury’s “Death is a Lonely Business.”

Across this new body of work, flowers bloom alongside fungi, light filters through interiors and gardens, and human presence lingers in traces—framed photographs, a bowl of citrus, a vase. Rendered with her signature luminosity and compositional grace, these paintings evoke the quiet richness of attention and care. In their balance of the everyday and the enchanted, Foster’s works remind us that beauty is not a luxury, but a way of seeing.

For further information on the artist and available works, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.