Madeline Hollander

The Upstairs

Bortolami Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of twenty-seven watercolors by Madeline Hollander, her second show at the gallery. These works on paper spring from the artist’s research and preparation for Hydro Parade, a performance series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which runs concurrently to the exhibition in June.

Hollander’s research-based practice culminates in a series of records—choreography, video, installation, and notational drawings—exploring the oft-imperceptible movement within various systems and the actors they interpolate. Her choreographic performance Hydro Parade traces the visible and hidden circuits of water that populate the Met, from the network of natural springs running beneath its buildings, to the series of fountains housed in its varied collections. A procession of dancers rhythmically journey through the aisles of the museum, like a stream flowing from wing to wing, lacing together a host of seemingly unconnected historic objects and waterways.

Together, the watercolors provide a depiction of Hydro Parade as a series of notations, maps, and costume design studies. A color-coded system nested throughout the artworks offers a concrete language decipherable to the artist through her synesthetic connection between chroma, alphabet, and gesture. Hollander produced the watercolors with water sourced from the natural spring beneath the museum, a resource which flows alongside the Old Croton Aqueduct, the waterway that once supplied New York City.

Initially trained as a ballet dancer, Madeline Hollander (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) studied cultural anthropology and visual arts at Barnard College (BA) and Bard College (MFA), New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2021); the University of Texas at Austin, Visual Arts Center (2020); Bortolami Gallery, New York (2020); The Artist’s Institute, New York (2018). Her work has been exhibited at ICA Boston (2022); the Brandhorst Museum, Munich, Germany (2022); Performa Biennial, New York (2021); The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut (2020); the Whitney Biennial curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta (2019), Helsinki Contemporary, Finland (2019), the Work Marathon Festival at the Serpentine Galleries in London (2018), and Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2019).

As a choreographer, Hollander’s pieces have been performed at the Joyce, New York; The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Louvre Abu Dhabi with the Los Angeles Dance Project, and she has collaborated with Jordan Peele on his feature film Us (2019) and Urs Fisher’s immersive installation Play at Gagosian, New York (2019) and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2019).