Remembering Dennis Hollingsworth

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By: Martin Mugar - Aug 25, 2023

"Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." (comment from NY artist Dennis Hollingsworth)

Coinciding with the debut of my writings in 2013 on the topic of Zombie Formalism I noticed that the New York artist Dennis Hollingsworth commenced to follow my writings with the occasional but always intelligent comment. The first time he commented on my painting is in the above statement made last year. The image to which he attached these words is also the first painting in years that I am most unequivocally happy about. For Hollingsworth it is functioning on at least three levels. (Text,Ground and Geometry).

The obvious observations made by Boston critics about the gooey candy-colored sensuality is not predominant for him but rather the functionality of the spatial play. He gets it probably because we are both swimming in the same waters, sharing especially the same attitude about the mark.

Dennis is attracted to a gnarly irreducible shape that he achieves by cutting his own nibs for the pastry applicator at the expense of the whole. I fall back on store bought nibs letters using the Cyrillic alphabet squeezed out also with a pastry applicator. Our marks are volumetric. For me the volumetric was a commentary on a road not taken in painting where the sloppy confidence of the abex stroke had taken over the thought process of so much painting. My exuded marks evolved from simple drips, to the Cyrillic alphabet, to whole words. Dennis refers to this as the text of the painting. The irreducible for Dennis lies in the strangeness of the stroke; for me the letter and the word.

In June I visited his gallery in Paris Galerie Richard and asked to see some of his work. The director demurred saying they were still in crates having been recently moved due to the closing of the Galerie Richard in NYC and the packing was hard to unpack. Upon my return to the USA I sent Dennis an email telling him of my visit but did not hear back. Recently, I visited his website only to remark that he was being referred to in the past tense. Someone engaged a ChatGPT write his story as an artist. It had a bittersweet lilt to it. It was dated April 2023. Why the gallery director did not mention his passing is surprising although it may still have been so recent as to have been painful topic to pursue.

I have no idea what happened. I feel fortunate to have heard his opinions on the art world which were for the most part conservative in intent. He was commenting on Twitter on the ongoing struggle in Ukraine understanding the manipulation of the American Neo-Cons in perpetuating it. He had just started to take and interest in the notion of Monadology as it might apply to his work. Again, the irreducible

The strangeness of the web where people appear and disappear.

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Reader Comments

"Here is Hollingsworth commenting on Zombie Formalism Another interesting blogpost comment from 2017 from Dennis Hollingsworth There won’t be an end to Zombie Formalism until we find its root cause. I suspect that you and I had the same reaction to the death of painting narrative: to rebel against it and focus on the corporeal body of paint in painting. And I suspect that you share my frustration to watch an art world not join in at least rejecting the idea of the end of not only painting but also of art ...but instead comply meekly with the spirit of the age as you so briskly illustrate with associated examples in the rest of society such as zero interest rate / quantitative easing. I see this too in architecture (my first degree, and I taught as an adjunct in California for 8 years in architectural design). During a recent conversation with a friend who is still teaching, he was complaining about the influence of parametric design (think Zaha Hadid and Greg Lynn) and how young architects and arch students are enamored with a kind of architecture that is relies on form automation via software. As a teacher, this kills the opportunity to instill architectural complex concepts and problem solving. Instead, acolytes are letting forms be generated by graphic programs and they are projecting sloppy architectural rationale onto them instead of creating the various systems (structural, circulation, enclosure, etc) and synchronizing them into a final synthesis. The enamor of shiny surfaces assumes that nothing within is important or interesting. The life within architecture need not exist at all. My assumption coming out of grad school (art) was completely off the mark: that it is the responsibility of every generation to question the received wisdom, shake it out in critique and fashion one specific for the subsequent one. Instead, all that was seemingly possible since the early 90’s was to write the bibliography and end notes for an art history for which no new chapters are considered permissible or possible. In recent years, the acknowledgement and branding of Zombie Art/Abstraction/Formalism seemed to sear our art world with an irrefutable indictment. (Thanks and congrats to your nomination!) But we all seem to carry on as if the critique is toothless. Maybe blood won’t be drawn until the whole art world gets the courage to reflect on the entirety of the Postmodern epoch and savagely critique it. I see no sign of this happening soon since to do this, one would have to see the arc of Postmodernism from the 60’s to today as a whole, a characterization that I seem to be absolutely alone in making. We are living the parable of the elephant and the blind men, it is as if we prefer to remain blind! Indeed, I had first noticed that it had been déclassé to even mention Postmodernism back in the mid-90’s, and people still yawn to this day. But I think the zombies will yet walk this earth until we take a hard look at our history and try to see what sapped the life out of art as we know it. All these thoughts have been simmering after reading your post, but it was watching this YouTube video that prompted me to send the link (below) to you. Now, I don’t want to encourage a transliteration of the content of the video to our shared concerns, but there is something interesting about how they describe what happens when the “purpose motive” drops out of society. I am associating this with the generational imperative in art to critique received knowledge and refashion a subsequent narrative to write the next chapter in art history. We as an art world have lost our purpose. What a better way to alternatively describe a zombie invasion?"

Posted By: Martin Mugar on 09-03-2023, 05:38 am