Chinatown Galleries: Solway Jones

Hadley Holliday & The Progressive Pleasures of Contemporary Female Painting

If one chooses to venture to the Soloway Jones Gallery in Chinatown, the obscurity of its location does not reflect the pertinent nature of its current show. Tucked away in the outskirts of Chinatown and masked behind white shades, the Soloway Jones Gallery displays Hadley Holliday’s paintings. Originally from Kansas, Hadley Holliday now paints in Los Angeles and creates large, colorful, abstract paintings. While Holliday’s works contain a lush color palate, graceful shapes, and soft textures that are stylistically pleasing, these paintings also imply a unique and inspired feminist perspective. As opposed to Abstract Expressionist’s rigid, impersonal forms rendered after World War II, Holliday’s modern abstractions contain organic shapes, warm tones, and fluidity. This deviation from a conventionally masculine art movement also demonstrates a departure from the overtly feminist art throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. Hadley Holliday does not project her female voice through provocative imagery like Lynda Benglis or direct appropriation of male artists’ paintings like Sherrie Levine. Rather, her paintings indirectly promote a female aesthetic and re-interpret masculine artistic traditions into engaging, accessible imagery.

Through material choices and stylistic rendering of form, Hadley Holliday represents abstract geometric shapes in a naturalistic, agreeable manner. To facilitate this process, the artist paints on unprimed canvases, which create an unrefined, rough texture to each piece. Compounding this raw backbone of Holliday’s work are her painting materials. Every color spectrum within the gallery, from her pastels to her dark purples, maintains a diluted quality due to Holliday’s decision to pour and stain acrylic paint onto the canvas. This artistic method also induced the paints to bleed together and subtly intertwined form and color. Lastly, Holliday disintegrates the boundaries of shape through directly incorporating earthly elements into her compositions. Within many of her paintings, especially the green and yellow piece, her stripes and arches are interjected with droplets of water and dots of paint. Thus, Holliday utilizes the traditional material elements of painting to defy conventional abstract representations. No longer rigid, severe, or polished, this imagery manifests through an organic intermingling between paint, water, and the canvas.


However, Hadley Holliday’s soft and pleasing renderings of basic shapes are not removed from an art historical context. Upon examining these paintings within the context of Abstract Expressionism, a subtle feminist critique is apparent. After World War II, artists such as Jackson Pollack and Marc Rothko challenged the conventions of art and culture through constructing bold, geometric paintings. As these works and others defined the Abstract Expressionist movement, the aesthetic was grounded in an exclusionary, masculine artistic style. Conversely, Hadley Holliday stylistically removes herself from these gendered associations and visual indicators of conventional Abstract Expressionism. Rather than conveying the aggressive, pessimistic, esoteric perspectives of the past, Hadley Holliday’s abstractions are light, lively, and inherently inclusionary, as she colorfully dispels the boundaries between shapes and the rigidity of geometric representations.


This process of de-emphasizing the masculine associations of abstract art demonstrates Hadley Holliday’s distinctively feminine point of view. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, feminist art overtly challenged sexist socio-cultural intuitions. Feminist artists such as Lynda Benglis, Judy Chicago, and Sherrie Levine produced artistic critiques that contained provocative imagery, anatomical representations of the femininity, and appropriation of male artists’ work. While these 1970’s female artists rejected the traditions of painting, Hadley Holliday constructively embraces this artistic medium. Promoting the more natural, intertwined qualities of abstract shape, she transgresses from a masculine aesthetic through manipulating painting’s most basic elements: canvas, water, and paint. Therefore, while older feminists chose a removed, literal critique of masculine socio-cultural dominance, Hadley Holliday colorfully engages the conventions of paintings to subtly manipulate its gendered elements.


In addition, these paintings not are not only dissociated from the traditions of Abstract Expressionism and 1970’s feminist art, Holliday’s vibrant, organic abstractions are removed from the controversial re-emergence of 1980’s painting as well.  During this renaissance of modern painting, many art critiques debated over the cultural implications of its return. Within her article American Painting: The Eighties, renowned art critic Barbara Jones praises the re-emergence of painting with the 1980’s art scene. Her review affirms that the re-appropriation of painting, the human form, and traditional modes of artistic representation is praiseworthy. She exclaims within her text, “the capacity of painting to evoke, imply, and conjure up magical illusions that exists in a imaginative mental space” is her primary reason to support this revived art form. Other critics claimed this admiring perspective does not acknowledge the reversion to a male dominated, misogynistic art, as the objectification of the female figure and dismissal of female artists returned. Benjamin Buchloch concludes in his article Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Paintings that 1980’s painting was a form of artistic regression void of a socio-political critique. He declares that 1980’s painting reaffirmed “the politics of a rigid conservatism through cultural legitimization.” Yet, while Barbara Rose overlooked the regressionist qualities of 1980’s painting, Hadley Holliday’ removes herself from this gendered controversy. Without incorporating human form and allegorical illusions, Holliday’s work does not correspond with the 1980’s painting traditions and its subsumed anti-feminist qualities. Once again, Hadley Holliday’s pieces embrace painting’s tradition; yet simultaneously dispel its masculine associations.


Whether intentional or not, Hadley Holliday’s paintings present a dual functionality. First, her stylized distancing from early Abstract Expressionism and 1980’s paintings demonstrates a twofold rejection of masculine aesthetics. Second, Holliday’s unprimed canvases, diluted colors, and fluid shapes present energetic pieces that are not only progressive, but captivating and aesthetically pleasing. Thus, a visit to the Soloway Jones Gallery will not inspire radical originality, but exemplify a female artist’s ability to enhance the visual pleasures of paintings and transcend its contentious past.