09/06/2022, New York, NY // PRODIGY: Feature Story //
FREE HOLIDAY
“THE SPIRIT OF THE THING”
Curated by Christopher Freeman
Opening Reception: 3 September 4-7pm
September 3 – October 9, 2022
530 Columbia Street, Hudson NY
Frank Holliday “Electric Lady Land” Oil on canvas 87″ x 156″
“I’ve always been marginalized. One day it turned and started chasing me.” –
Frank Holiday
Following MoMA’s recent integration of an important painting by the artist Private public gallery is pleased to present The Spirit of the Thing, an exhibition of recent paintings by Frank Holliday.
As John Yau writes in Hyperallergic: “This is the remarkable thing about Holliday’s decision to work in this tradition: at no point did I feel that he was bombastic, ironic, parodic or self-confident, which according to all critical accounts – from Arthur Danto to Thierry de Duve and Hal Foster – is currently required when applying a gestural brushstroke to a canvas. If your brush isn’t full of irony, anything you paint with it is illegitimate. Holliday proves this long-held view wrong. He is what you would call a modernist abstract artist in love with gestural painting – a fish out of water. And yet the paintings, with their searing reds, icy blues, warm yellows, and creamy whites, feel neither dated nor nostalgic, and that’s what kept me looking.”
Carter Ratcliff‘s also points to the tendency of Holliday’s work to affect the viewer viscerally.; At the end of his essay in Holliday’s Monograph: “The floods of color that inundate Holliday’s paintings evoke a splendor we all recognize because, like him, we were one with them. By presenting these colors with such immediacy and energy, he helps us envision a world even more vibrant and meaningful than this one. Or it would make more sense to say that he shows us through his painterly example how we can be more intense than usual in our world…
