The Hole is proud to announce our second solo exhibition of paintings by British-born painter Nick Mead. This will be the second exhibition of new paintings by the artist in our rear gallery space.

Since debuting his large-scale works in 2012, the artist has moved away from the stark black and white palette to integrate further hues and compositional complications. In 2014 he debuted a series of red-splashed canvasses at Casa del Popolo, artist Julian Schnabel's dark wood-paneled ground floor gallery space. Here his signature protrusions of paint were both engulfed by and peeped out from the sloshing red flows across the surface in grand and dramatic fashion.

These 2017 works go further into color and gesture where the backgrounds take on pigment, the scribbly black tangles peppered with paint balls recede while brushwork and big pours of paint make larger forms out of the noisiness. One might see the works as musical, as improvisational, but the main compositional component would be their interconnectivity; all elements link up here with line work and pours.

The artist is at times literally connecting the dots for us, though the meaning of the pieces in a larger sense remains elusive. They feel "grandiloquent" but semantically silent, how about that? The show title "Paintings", and the artwork titles "The Painter on His Way to Work" give us nothing to pin down exactly, except that the works could be about painting, being a painter, the work of painting; which is of course something we are all very interested in!