SEE/SAW
Frank Holliday
NEW YORK | MUCCIACCIA GALLERY
Until September 30, 2020
Frank Holliday, Loie, Loie, 2018, oil on linen, 172 x 142 cm | 67.7 x 55.9
Mucciaccia Gallery is proud to present an extensive exhibition on the American artist, Frank Holliday.
Following MoMA’s recent integration of an important painting by the artist into their permanent collection, Mucciaccia Gallery brings together a fine selection of paintings intended to explore Holliday’s visual language.
Curated by the esteem writer, curator and critic, Carter Ratcliff, the 28 canvases on view will be an explosion of color, where great force and energy are revealed. Holliday, like the great old masters Titian, Rubens, and Caravaggio, uses color to manipulate light and draw his audiences in.
Color is an essential element in Holliday’s work. The artist uses color in a theatrical way to create a visceral response from the viewer. His alluring paintings are a result of strong brushstrokes and heavy pouring and smearing The results of so create suggestive depths to the viewer and transports them into another dimension; Where Heaven and Hell are much part of it. As Peter Hujar once said to Holliday, ”Frank, just follow the work. It will show you where to go.” Embracing his influence of hundreds of great artists including Bernini, Goya, Monet, Degas, Turner, De Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Schnabel, and Mitchell, Holliday derived that his canvas was to become his own space and embellish his own mark. It was in the 1970’s and 1980’s, during the explosion of the East Village art scene and the Club 57 glory days, that the Neo-Abstract Expressionist reached for his fame.
Holliday often remembers living through those times as exciting yet tragic. His fellow compatriot of art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, once told him: ”Frank it’s not about fitting in, it’s about fitting out…”
And Indeed Holliday enjoys ‘fitting out’ of the crowd. A well deserved moment of glory to the man who believes that he is a survivor to that error.
Dates: until September 30, 2020
Curated by Carter Ratcliff
Location
520 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011
For more information please contact
newyork@mucciaccia.com
WORKS
Frank Holliday, The Hunt, oil on canvas
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1957 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Lives and works in New York.
Holliday began as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute and later went on to perfect his techniques at The New York Studio School and The School of Visual Arts in New York. A Painter and performance artist connected to the Neo Abstract and Neo Expressionist Movement, Holliday reaches fame in New York during the 1970s and 1980s, is often associated with the East Village art scene and the Club 57.
In the early years of his career as an artist, he worked closely with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson and Kenny Scharf.
Frank Holliday has exhibited with the Kenny Schacter and Tony Shafrazi Galleries and has solo exhibitions at Debs & Co., Tom Cugliani Gallery, The Kitchen, GAL Gallery, and Mucciaccia Gallery Singapore.
He participates in numerous group exhibitions at prestigious New York spaces such as The Arts Club, Derek Eller, White Columns, Sandra Gering Gallery, Amy Lipton Gallery, Elizabeth Dee, Barbara Toll Fine Art, Lennon Weinberg, PS1, and the Club 57 with Keith Haring.
His work receives critical acclaim and is the subject of reviews written by Holland Cotter and Stephen Westfall in Art in America, Gluek Grace and Ken Johnson for The New York Times, and Bill Arning for the Village Voice.
Holliday is included in the Heiner Friedrich collection as well as numerous important private collections worldwide in the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia and Mexico.
His works are also found in prestigious museum collections such as Moma New York; The Weatherspoon Museum at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro; The Museum Frederick Russe of Stockholm; the Miniature Museum of Amsterdam.
He is awarded the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986, the Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship in 2010, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Fellowship in 2010 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2015.
His most recent exhibitions include Frank Holliday, Museo Bilotti, Vila Borghese, Rome, Italy (2019) and Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983, MoMa in New York (2017-2018).
