Frank Holliday

Abstraction is a way to explore the infinite possibilities of expression of both colors and the body beyond any existing linguistic codes. For Frank Holliday, painting becomes a vector to create epic metaphors of human existence, before morphing into language and rational formulation.

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present the fourth iteration of the Prelude Series, highlighting Frank Holliday’s expansive work, Us, a signatory canvas that pushes, pulls, and encapsulates the viewer in its singularity. Bursting with vibrant colors and animated by contrasts, Holliday’s paintings fully embrace the idea of élan vital explored by Henri Bergson in which the vital force, a principle of creativity immanent in all organisms, is considered responsible for a continuous evolution. This élan vital penetrates the painting tides as they flood the canvas almost instinctively, amounting to an unexpected and uncontrolled evolution on the surface.

Connecting the psychic and somatic levels, Holliday's recent abstraction seems to mount a spectacle of evanescent floating bodies, embodied in the kaleidoscopic texture of densely intricate layers of colors. Akin to hallucinations, these flaming canvases offer the same surrender to sensations experienced in extremely intense life moments as sex, deep pain, and death. Simultaneously connecting us deeper to our bodies, bringing us closer to certain realms, beyond the physically tangible.

Exploring the chiasma between eyes and the gaze, body and perception, the artist delivers himself, his body to the canvas, engaging in an arbitrary exploration of the physical, psychological and symbolic manifestation of colors in motion. Any distinction between figure and background is eliminated in powerful abstraction. It questions the relationship between possession and dispossession, adherence and distance, that characterizes the experience of our body in relation to others and with the world as Merleau-Ponty theorized.

A certain tension between ascendant and descendant currents of color can be felt, as an expression of an inescapable dynamic balance between the positive and negative forces that comprise the cosmos. Approaching the canvas as a heterogeneous space, Holliday’s painting fumbles and searches in this limbo between hell and paradise, eros and thanatos, ecstasy and suffering.

Hailing from New York’s Lower East Side 1980’s club scene at the center of Club57, Holliday transfers subconscious memories and intense feelings of an entire era, from rebellious vitality, free sexual expression, to the sense of dramatic loss caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic on his canvases.

In the horror vacui of Holliday’s comprehensive canvases, art becomes an "organ of revelation of the absolute”. Infinity and creativity are rendered explicit, transcending the human limit of ordinary perception.

Prelude is an innovative series of capsule projects hosted at our flagship location at 396 Johnson Avenue. This initiative is designed to provide a first encounter with the practice of an artist on the gallery’s horizon. The core of this concept revolves around an intimate presentation to introduce a deeper dive in a future exhibition: in our viewing room, a chosen artist takes the stage alongside our duo of full-scale exhibitions. Serving as a point of introduction, this compact yet impactful display allows viewers to create first impressions of the gallery’s new talents, establishing the thematic essence of our upcoming collaboration.

Frank Holliday (b. 1957, Greensboro, NC) is a painter who lives and works in New York. He gained recognition for his work in the 1970’s and 1980’s and was associated with the social scene of Club 57, paving the way for New York City’s underground nightlife. Frank Holliday earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY and the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been featured in numerous shows including at Mucciaccia Gallery, NY and Singapore, the Carlo Bilotti Museum, Rome, MoMA, NY, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva, and Club 57, NY, among many others. His work is also housed in prestigious institutional collections at the Weatherspoon Museum, North Carolina, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and at Frederick Russe, Stockholm.