
Hadley Holliday: “Paintings” at SolwayJones
by George Melrod
November 2009

Forever and Never, 2009
Maneuvering a graceful balance between precision and experimentation, the thoughtful, visually appealing canvases of Hadley Holliday are informed by a spectrum of historical precedents, but address them very much on her own terms, with far more sincerity than cynicism. Like Mark Grotjahn, the Los Angeles (Blum and Poe) -based painter who over the past half decade has glided to visible project room shows at the Hammer and the Whitney on the wings of color-chart butterflies and pinwheels, Holliday employs a conscribed formal and conceptual vocabulary to engage abstraction at its roots. In this, her first solo show, the 2004 Cal Arts MFA graduate seems to be striking out in multiple directions and for the most part hitting her mark.
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AROUND THE GALLERIES
By Holly Myers
September 18, 2009
p. D 23
Artist of a totally different stripe
If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, as I will admit that I have from time to time, that you would be quite content to reach the end of your life without ever laying eyes on another stripe painting — at least by anyone born after 1960 — then Hadley Holliday’s lovely exhibition at SolwayJones should come as a breath of fresh air: proof that there’s joy to be found yet in what has come to seem a dull and largely reactionary genre.
It’s not that her stripe paintings — which constitute roughly half of the 11 works on display — are especially radical. They’re large, for the most part (up to roughly 6 1/2 by 4 1/2 feet), and composed on unprimed canvases, to create the soft, saturated feel of a Helen Frankenthaler.
In some the stripes swirl into knots, in others they arc like rainbows staked on top of one another. In some they form grids.
Holliday is a graceful colorist, however, with trust in the simplicity of her forms to carry the nuance of her palette. (In addition to the stripes, the show includes a number of smaller squares — 30-by-30 inches — filled with free-form washes of color.) The tones are sweet without being saccharine, gentle without being timid or shallow: lavender, violet, salmon, sky blue, indigo, coral, rose and butter yellow, all grounded with shrewd accents of gray and black.
Her application of the pigment is equally sensitive. Her strokes are loose, perhaps intuitive, without being lazy. Most of the canvases are scattered with drips and, in a peculiarly charming gesture, she generally guides the stripes around them. It results in a sense of warmth and humanity that the stripe — among other classic motifs of abstraction — is often employed to deny.
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