Dennis Hollingsworth

Hello World

What's this?

My gallery asked me if I wanted to title the show that's coming up at my gallery in New York, Nicole Klagsbrun. I was surprised that I was taken by surprise.

An acquaintence once said to me -real slow for emphasis: "It's show biz-ness, Dennis.

I disagree. Art is bigger than that.

(But I'm a stubborn jackass sometimes, so some people have said. Even so...)

Designing art for a show, much less paintings, seems crazy to me. First, there is the problem of how design distracts from the (albeit dangerous) self centering plunge required to plumb the depths (sometimes and even though such as they are). Unless the show is bought or otherwise taken and protected by a collector/custodian, it will be dimembered and dispersed into the world. It's so ephemeral. A few weeks and it's over, cut to pieces. Paintings-meant-as-installation doesn't do it for me.

Paintings are singular and in relation to the entirety of the life that made them and the world that made that life.

A show for me a slice of the studio, an interval of experience where a lifetime's arc of curiosity is hologrammed into each painting. One follows the next in a trace of the movement of a mind in the world. Each painting is a piton hammered into a mountain, each one pointing emphatically towards an immense topology called inspiration.

***

Or something like that.

Soooooooo.

The image above is an ad.

I named the show after this blog.

It seemed like the right thing to do.