Frank Holliday

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Frank Holliday is a painter who became known in the New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. And is often associated with the East Village scene.

Frank Holliday exhibited with galleries such as Kenny Schacter Gallery, Tony Shafrazi Gallery and has had several solo shows at Debs & Co. and Tom Cugliani Gallery as well as The Kitchen, Dru Artstark and GAL Gallery. He’s been represented in numerous group shows including shows at The Arts Club, White Columns, Sandra Gering Gallery, Amy Lipton Gallery, Barbara Toll Fine Art and Club 57 with Keith Haring, all in NYC. Holiday was also chosen as one of the Absolut Vodka artists, joining world famous artists such as painter Andy Warhol and glass artist Hans Godo Frabel. For more info, see the Absolut Vodka Artists website. His work has been the subject of reviews by Holland Cotter and Stephen Westfall in Art in America, Grace Gluek and Ken Johnson in the New York Times, and Bill Arning in the Village Voice, and has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant."

Education: attended: San Francisco Art Institute, New York Studio School, BFA: School of Visual Arts 1979

[edit] Related links

• Frank Holliday's Flickr page with more images of his new paintings
• Visual AIDS Gallery
• A monograph about Artist Frank Holliday written by writer/critic Carter Ratcliff which uses mr. Holliday's paintings and stories as an armature to discuss cultural change in the New York art world for the last 30 years. This will be used for a catalogue for a mid career survey of Mr. Hollidays work.
• Review of Frank Holliday's recent show, titled "Trippin' in America," Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Joe Fyfe
  In Frank Holliday's recent show, titled "Trippin' in America," Jackson Pollock's emotive automatism seemed to be in joyous, campy collision with an unabashed belief in the power of hallucination. Holliday has been exhibiting since 1980, plunging in and out of abstraction; he has also spent time working for Disney studios, and there's a family resemblance between his new work and the animated painterliness and intense chromatics of Fantasia.
  The paintings range from 2 by 3 feet to 8 feet square. Colors are turned up loud, and the surfaces are sticky and shiny, like a sweaty body at a light show. Though the work is gestural, something of a painting program is followed. Holliday always appears to begin with feathery, illusionistic brushstrokes that suggest an expansive, cinematic space and then improvises over them with a repertoire of painterly conventions.
  Dayafter (2001), an 8-foot-square canvas, is dominated by ruby reds and swimming-pool turquoises. Much grandiose painting business is imposed on top of a large blue spiral enclosing washy green transparencies. For the foreground, Holliday borrows painting tropes such as pouring and turning the canvas until ladder-like sideways rivulets form (a la Polke), or utilizing a faux-Zen twisting splash (a Motherwell specialty), or creating a kind of "comb" by making a short arc with a brush loaded with runny paint and letting the extended "teeth" run downward in parallel drips (in the manner of Pat Steir). This last mark seems to arrive toward the end of the painting, as if making a curtain call from one of the edges.
  In Holliday's bigger pours, such as the massive red that rises from the bottom edge to the center of Dayafter, the paint is so thick that it puckers in places or sags like old skin. There are also moves he makes that are almost too funky. In a number of the paintings, he uses white paint suspended in a transparent medium so that it hits the canvas like a broken egg. I'm also not sure about Holliday's thick black brushstroke that weighs everything down, looping through the compositions like a poisonous umbilical cord or an oily intestine. Still, these are quibbles about work that is capable of being very beautiful. Again and again, Holliday impresses with his ability to push past taste and enact a fantasy in paint, come what may.