It is the first solo exhibition of American painter Dennis Hollingsworth at Richard titled Burgeoning, from January 30 to March 9, 2019. Dennis Hollingsworth made his international recognition in the 90’s by adding sculptural shapes of oil painting on raw canvases, making a statement about the revival of Painting in a period in which the mainstream intellectuals pretended that Painting was dead. For over twenty years, Dennis Hollingsworth has been searching for the extents of embodied paint. Within the limits of the surface tension of impasto, his recombinant lexicon of form involving prickly balls, stamps, stomps, flings, prints, and flowering peels of paint is screened and sheared through images of nature, text and the broken technological screen. In the past year and a half, he has extended the facture of paint to the facture of the support.
Following what he considers Robert Ryman’s unfinished project of considering the whole of a painting as eligible for expression from the surface to the mounting to the wall and wary yet inspired by Donald Judd’s rebellion against the rectangular plane “…it limits and determines the arrangement of whatever is on or in it…”, Hollingsworth has extended his exploration to the architectonic plastic possibilities of wood, wire, screws and glue. Louis Kahn famously asked a brick what it wanted to be, and Hollingsworth has let painting be anything it wants to be… between the limited and limitless possibilities of the medium.
The exhibition is composed of eighteen artworks. It mixes signature paintings on standard canvases as well as his most recent developments in the third physical dimensions by manipulating stretcher and the canvas materials.
The diversity of his painting practice is mirrored in the diversity of his experience. Born in Madrid, Spain, his childhood was spent in eleven locations around the world, including Philippines, Panama, and Las Vegas. Once a sailor in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, always an architect by way of his first degree, he is a graduate of the Claremont Graduate University in Southern California. His works are in the permanent collections of the MOCA Los Angeles, CA, The Nerman Museum of Contemporay Art, Overland Park, KS, The Akron Museum, Akrons OH, The Akzo Nobel Collection, Amsterdam, Netherlands, The Colección Riera Roura, Barcelona, Spain. He lives and works in NYC and in Tossa de Mar, Spain’s Catalan Costa Brava.
Richard will present a Dennis Hollingsworth’s solo exhibition in Paris from October 5th to November 19, 2019.