NYAB Event - Dennis Hollingsworth “You Will Know”

Dennis Hollingsworth “You Will Know”

Hionas Gallery LES

This event has ended.

“We’ve been making art as negation for so long that it was bound to explode.” In Hollingsworth’s own words he reveals a glimpse of what motivates him in each new body of work. Indeed, the trials and lore of modernism and post-modernism, from Turner to LeWitt, can be felt in the fluid movements and marbled forms present throughout his canvases, if not exactly seen. Hollingsworth begins each day in the studio with mounds of unmixed oil of varying color formed on a palette, his tools laid out in surgical order, resembling an origami workstation. Spatulas, palette knives, thinned-out brushes, and bulbous daubers made from balled up fabric are just some of the items present, each serving a specific purpose for each painting. The apparent chaos that rapidly fills each canvas is in fact an exercise in precision.

An unusually heavy impasto of lines, drips and dots are applied atop the canvas and one another until vivid repetitions of color lay way to waves, cascades and small explosions of pure paint. These elemental forms interact in such ways that they bear each other’s energy. Movement within a painting is an illusion, but Hollingsworth’s exaggerated alla prima technique yields whole works that are not static; movement is not an illusion but a factor of a painting’s age and placement.

Hollingsworth is showing us just what is possible with oil paint, which for any true appreciator of the medium must feel like a return to nature. Who among us thought the New could still be achieved? Whereas Minimalism is the rejection of symbolism for pure structure, sans evidence of the artist’s touch, Hollingsworth’s mission as a practitioner of oil and canvas is to bring the art of affirmation back into the fold. His is a potent and evocative language wherein materiality and allowing the medium’s tools to exist in their barest state is the most honest form of expression. From ashes to ashes is simply From oil to oil.

Dennis Hollingsworth received his MFA from the Claremont Graduate School in 1991. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the U.S., with solo exhibitions at Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Galeria Miguel Marcos, Barcelona; and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. He lives and work in New York City and Tossa del Mar, Spain.