Cirrus Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of lithographs and monoprints by Dennis Hollingsworth. In 1998, he created a series of three lithographs called Hearts and Minds. Since then, he has explored the immediate and tactile process of lithographic monoprints employing both silkscreening and collage. In his most recent series, The Dog, “monads” drift across the picture plane as Hollingsworth reflects on Goya’s Black Paintings and the uncertainty of figure and of ground.
“Goya painted The Dog at the end of his life as he took refuge in a villa near Madrid. After initially painting the walls with conventionally inspiring images, he overpainted them with what we now know today as his Black Paintings. I mark the beginning of my career in art with a visit to the Prado when i was a young teenager, and because of this, Goya’s work has been my touchstone.
With this third monoprint project at Cirrus, I settled on conjuring fields of patterns derived from the peeling of ink embedded between printing plates. The resulting effect is organic patterns created by the separating of the two metal plates containing printing ink.
Multiple plates floated color over color and soon, the atmosphere of The Dog began to bloom on the paper. The corollary of the turbulence of Peninsular War of Goya’s time to our own global problems today is made with caution. Change brings uncertainty and dread and for this I drew the dark veil of Goya’s Black Paintings down across the colorful lithographic inks with a black silkscreen.
The Dog is as simple as a figure in a field. The creature is a figure of fragile hope. The figures in these monoprints are inkjet avatars culled from the language of fracture. These spiny hemispheres of paint, resembling sea urchins, I call them monads, a name inspired by the author of Monadology, German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Thus, monads for this project are my dogs.”