Joseph Holtzman:
September 23rd, 2021 - January 15th, 2022
Photography by Timothy Doyon
Nina Johnson Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Joseph Holtzman. The artist’s ghost-like paintings rendered on stone surfaces elicit a haunted sense of memory in the viewer. The long-lived spirits of both fictional and historic realms co-mingle.
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Joseph Holtzman, installation view. Photo by Timothy Doyan
The smooth nature of the stone allows the viewer to feel as though the paint is moving in real-time, sliding across a picture plane in an animated gesture, where the images drift onto their monolithic backings. Absorbing them feels like a dream.
Holtzman, founder and publisher of Nest magazine, closed the publication in 2004 to concentrate on painting. Holtzman’s home near Chatham, New York is filled top to turn with a broad range of creative outputs: textiles, paintings, historic objects, sculpture; all of which come together to form a visual encyclopedia that colludes with Holtzman’s uniquely informed history to create the backdrop from which his work is produced.
For this exhibition, Holtzman has included two recently completed sculptural assemblages. These pieces refer to tableau and function, each a stage on which their own elements create an unfolding drama.
Joseph Holtzman (b. 1957 in Baltimore, MD) lives and works near Chatham, NY. In 2014, the artist presented his first solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which traveled to the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has since entered their permanent collections. Recent solo exhibitions include Six Recent Paintings, Parker Gallery (off-site presentation in New York, NY) (2020) and Six Recent Paintings, Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA (2018). Select group exhibitions include Strange, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2019) and Color, Form, Unicorn: Recent Acquisitions, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2018). Holtzman’s work will be entering the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.