Dennis Hollingsworth

The Thickening

For the next month, I have an exhibition up at Galerie Miguel Marcos, Barcelona. Titled "The Thickening", it focuses on the material-formal-structural dimension that has been a key aspect of my painting for the past twenty five years. Here is the gallery statement showcasing the exhibition:

Miguel Marcos Gallery presents a new Dennis Hollingsworth exhibition. Under the title of "The Thickening", the artist exhibits his latest creations, based on the experimentation of a new technique that, as usual in his work, surpasses the traditional two-dimensional space.

In this exhibition, painting as such becomes a malleable, ductile and extraordinarily flexible element, which allows him to express deeply Mediterranean essences and emotions, this geographical environment being the inspiration for his recent works, in which he continues to use paint. as something physical and material, as a constructive element, thanks to the alla prima technique, which combines with "Thickening", where thickness deals with the materialization of the object, how it exists in time and space, and of its robustness capacity.

The chromaticism used exhibits a wealth of nuances, captured in a striking and brilliant way, based on masses of color, with little use of the brush and much of the spatula, and the incorporation of new elements, presenting experimental, abstract creations that make up a world where sovereignty centers on emotional fierceness, and bold, forward-thinking determination.

For the artist, the time required to conceive forms that do not admit corrections or layers, allows him to deconstruct the pictorial gesture, in which painting is the main axis of the work, regardless of the abstraction or the alphanumeric characters that he exhibits in this sample. As he is accustomed to us, in his compositions they continue to sprinkle colored stars, frayed pure stumps of thick oil.

The viewer can observe all this in works such as: "The Dam", which refers us to a water containment dam that breaks, thus signifying the end of a period of stillness. In the work "Fifth Pine", the multitude of letters glide for a long time into the distance, In "Years of Glory", the canvas dominated by the intense and striking red color, we can read the name of Lorenzo, who Hollingsworth points so much to the famous MotoGP star, like the nickname that is also called the sun, when it shows its maximum intensity.

Regarding the larger works in the exhibition, they are two twin pieces that express the reflections that arose when contemplating the impressive rocky features in Cap Tossa. From "Mountain to Sea", and the opposite, the usual sharp hemispherics and masses of paint have been abandoned, to rely on the spatula as an expression of the abstraction of the pieces, with a leap from filling to filling competing in fluidity, to show the continual presence of the sensation of the changing waves.

In the works "Once Was" and "Lil 'Leonids" the multicolored whirlwind of the artist's palette is observed, in which it gives rise to a work full of symbolism sensing freedom and containment, the original chaos and the most harmonious fantasy confusion.

Dennis Hollingsworth (Los Angeles, 1956) Graduated in Architecture from the University of California, belongs to that group of expressionist painters that emerged in the city of Los Angeles in the 90's. His work is represented in Museums and public collections such as El Dallas Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.