PRIVATE PUBLIC GALLERY

FRANK HOLLIDAY

“THE SPIRIT OF THE THING”

Curated by Christopher Freeman

Opening Reception: September 3rd  4pm-7pm

September 3rd – October 9th, 2022

530 Columbia Street, Hudson NY

“I always chased the edge. One day it turned around and started chasing me.” – Frank Holliday

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 what is remarkable about Holliday’s decision to work in this tradition: at no point did I feel he was being bombastic, ironic, parodic, or self-conscious, which by all critical accounts – from Arthur Danto to Thierry de Duve and Hal Foster – is currently required if you plan to apply a gestural paint stroke to a canvas. Unless your brush is loaded with irony, whatever you paint with it will be 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 — seem neither old fashioned nor nostalgic, and that is what kept me looking.”

Carter Ratcliff’s also points to the tendency of Holliday’s work to viscerally impact the viewer.; ending his essay in Holliday’s Monograph: “The tides of color that flood Holliday’s paintings recall splendors we all recognize because, like him, we have been at one with them. By presenting these colors with such immediacy, such energy, he helps us imagine a world even more vivid, more deeply significant than this one. Or it might make more sense to say that he shows us, by his painterly example, how to be in our world more intensely than we usually are. If we insist on extracting a message from one of his paintings, it might be this: there is no message, no moral of the story. For there is no story, at least none with a beginning, middle and end; rather, there is a field of inexhaustible possibility.”

“I work for months on a painting using all my rituals and rules that I create for myself, until the day comes when I’m not thinking anymore, and I’m finally beyond myself. When my thinking finally goes out the window, that’s when the doors open, and things start to happen. Everything comes together and becomes something I recognize from somewhere else, it’s not a place that has language, but it’s something that’s definitely a lot bigger than me.” — Frank Holliday

Private Public Gallery is exhibiting Holliday’s large-scale paintings with a bench in the middle of the gallery. You will need to sit down. These paintings don’t just feel as if they are looking back at you, they feel as if the presence of many lifetimes have arrived.

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