Frank Holliday: The Monotypes
By Michael Gormley
If Holliday’s grandly baroque abstractions are fully realized operas….his monotypes are purified hymnals.
Frank Holliday, “Moth to Flame,” monotype on paper, 2020
Following a high-profile year of solo exhibitions at the Museo Carlo Bilotti ( in Rome’s Villa Borghese), Galleria Mucciaccia’s new Chelsea, NYC location and at Equity Gallery, Frank Holliday found himself stalled in the same locked-down surreality the world was collectively denying. Just short of losing his mind, Holliday did what artists have always done in good times and bad—he kept working—albeit from home. Constrained by space limitations and having little in the way of useable materials, he embarked on a monotype print series. Fifteen of these one-off prints are available for viewing and purchase via Equity Gallery’s online project space.
Frank Holliday, “Electra,” monotype on paper, 2020
Best known for large-scale, color-saturated, gestural abstractions that pulse with a Turneresque scintillating light, Holliday’s monotypes, seen as orchestrated arrangements in black and white, are a fitting departure in world grown stark and polarized. Bled of life’s modulating chroma, Holliday’s duo-tone compositions recall Goya’s Los Deseastres de la Guerra etchings. Equally poignant, the Monotypes depict scenes of great strife—pitched battles— of light fighting for its very life whilst mired in the tar pits and oily fields of a voracious darkness. “The Monotypes are quotation marks around the pandemic” , Holliday notes, “I’ve not done works like this before. I hope I won’t need to again…”
If Holiday’s baroque abstractions are fully realized operas, with complex and studied gestures sweeping shards of colored light along whirling patterns, the Monotypes are purified hymnals. The grand gestures, now tempered, stake out the front lines in opposing figure/ground zones that chronicle dramatic episodes in a creationist’s fiction.
Frank Holliday, “Sage,” monotype on paper, 2020
Distant kin to Ross Bleckner’s 1980s memorial paintings (created during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis) the Monotypes similarly offer an aide- mémoire mourning repose. Both artists exploit a Rorschach chiaroscuro to affect a tension between pure abstraction and narrative allusion. Seduced by the black mirror, the spectator spontaneously invents a “what they think they see” personalized and fictionalized response.
In the case of Holliday, the Monotypes also inspire a mental note taking ---they act as a safety net to contain fleeting thoughts and lists of what needs to be said or done. In the time of pandemic, when time atrophies and self-identity and relationships stagnate, what we may need most are the memory traces recanting what occurred in the before times.
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About the Artist
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.
View Frank Holliday’s work available for sale on NYAE’s online art market.
Take a virtual tour of Holliday’s studio in this episode of Artists Equity’s Studio Breaks series.