Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to present Holly Coulis’s third solo show at the gallery, opening Friday, October 25 and running through December 8. The show will feature paintings and sculptures. A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, October 25 from 6-8PM.
Over the past several years, Coulis’s unique approach to still life painting has advanced a new and contemporary perspective in the genre. Coulis uses color in unexpected and exciting ways, building up hues in layers and creating radiant lines between and amongst fields of deep pigmentation. The objects in her compositions both sit upon their tables and surfaces, and intersect them in an overall flatness of field, becoming entangled in line and shape. In perspectival shifts, lemons and oranges press outwards towards the edges of the canvas as they pull foreground and background into their centers; vases and pitchers cast shadows that morph into reflections and sometimes become entirely new forms.
In these new paintings, the objects become less representational, moving towards the abstraction of color and outline. What, in the past, have been clear indications of “table” become structural – less a surface for presenting the still life and more an armature from which other elements hang in Coulis’s complex geometric play.
In addition to paintings, Coulis will be exhibiting works of sculpture for the first time. Six painted wood constructions carry her pursuits in geometry and still life into three dimensions. The sculptures push Coulis’s arrangements into physical architectures of color and shape, with the still life elements extending on multiple axes. The sculptures even feature some moving parts: fruits that rotate out and back into her compositions.
Holly Coulis (b. 1968, Toronto, Ontario) lives and works in Athens, Georgia. She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. In addition to past shows at Klaus von Nichtssagend, she has recently exhibited at Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles, Simon Lee Gallery in London and Hong Kong, SOCO Gallery in Charlotte, NC and Cooper Cole in Toronto. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic among others.
