Still life art is a genre of art that depicts mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects that are either natural or human-made. The objects can be anything from food, flowers, and dead animals to drinking glasses, books, and vases. The origins of still-life painting can be traced back to the Middle Ages and Ancient Greco-Roman art, but it emerged as a distinct genre and professional specialization in Western painting by the late 16th century.

One of the advantages of the still-life art form is that it allows an artist much freedom to experiment with the arrangement of elements within a composition of a painting. Still life occupied the lowest rung of the hierarchy of genres, but it has been extremely popular with buyers. In modern art, simple still-life arrangements have often been used as a relatively neutral basis for formal experiment, for example, by Paul Cézanne, the cubist painters, and later in the twentieth century, by Patrick Caulfield.

Still life art can be a celebration of material pleasures such as food and wine, or often a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures and of the brevity of human life. The objects chosen for a still life painting often have a special meaning, either on a personal, cultural, societal, religious, or philosophical level. The themes surrounding the artwork often provoke introspection and reflection in the viewer. The way that the objects are depicted can evoke a wide variety of emotions, depending on their arrangement, as well as the lighting, color choice, and handling of the paint.

In addition to painting, still-life art has been extended beyond the traditional two-dimensional art forms into video art and three-dimensional art forms such as sculpture, performance, and installation. Some mixed media still-life works employ found objects, photography, video, and sound, and even spill out from ceiling to floor and fill an entire room in a gallery.