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Equity Gallery is thrilled to announce Saturn Return, a retrospective of the artworks of New York based artist Frank Holliday. Coming to us directly from his solo show at the Villa Borghase’s Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome, this exhibition chronicles and examines the evolution of the artist’s eclectic body of work over the span of the last 40 years.
Holliday’s career took root in the chaotic environment of the East Village in the 1980s. During this time, he found himself creating and showing art alongside contemporaries such as Elizabeth Murray, Keith Haring, and many more. From these beginnings, Holliday helped establish a foundational platform through the seminal alternative art and performance space, Club 57. Although short-lived, Club 57’s wild, experimental presence left a long lasting, formative impact on art, performance, music, and popular culture as they are known today.
Within his sprawling, ever-changing body of work, arguably the single constant in Holliday’s art is the same “anything-goes” spirit that made the legacy of the East Village scene so monumentally influential and enduring. Each of his paintings exhibit an unbridled, fluid spontaneity. Holliday utilizes a wide array of disparate elements, ranging from art history to the human toll of the AIDs epidemic to personal memories, merging them into expressionistic painted forms based on pure emotional drive. Most recently, looking toward Italian Old Masters such as Caravaggio and Bernini, Holliday has been able to synthesize essential aesthetics into entirely new poetic interpretations. In doing so, his work embraces seemingly paradoxical qualities. Thick impasto swirls of paint are rendered in a robust manner, which imparts a fleeting, airy appearance despite their weightiness and colors seamlessly transition from vibrant, rich, and clear to heavy, dark, and muddy. These contradictions merge and solidify into uniquely dynamic and active, yet harmonious compositions.
Saturn Return will be on view at Equity Gallery from September 18th - October 6th.
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Frank Holliday, born 1957 in North Carolina, USA, is a painter who became known in the New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s and is often associated with the East Village scene. Frank Holliday has exhibited with many galleries throughout America, Asia, and Europe. Recently, he was included in the ”CLUB 57” exhibition at MoMA, had a solo show in Singapore at the Partners and Mucchaccia Gallery, and a museum exhibition at the Villa Borghase’s Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome. His work has been the subject of reviews in Art in America, New York Times, Village Voice, Art Republic, Ocular, Elle, Forbes, The Beast, to name a few and a book titled “Holliday” has recently been published. He was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation , the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015.
Equity Gallery, 245 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002
