art

The artist's first major exhibition was held at the Keane Mason Gallery, New York in 1980. Called Human Field Paintings, the works were derived from small sections of the human body expanded and flattened to create ambiguous readings of the figure and to open a dialogue about the way the body is socially interpreted. For the next two decades the human form was used in a broader sense; to reflect on our relationship to the world and how we interpret our experience of it. In this sense the work aimed for a philosophical and social leaning rather than a political one.

During the Modernist period artists were generally encouraged to demonstrate a regular, recognisable style. But taking issue with this idea, during the 1980s the artist examined a series of different processes to extend his interests across a range of philosophical propositions. The early Human Fields Paintings began to fracture and then later to fragment as the imagery moved further from representation.

In 1989, following a move back to Melbourne and a new environment, the artist reintroduced the human figure in response to observations of the street people in the vicinity of his Fitzroy studio. But these anonymous figures were not designed to illustrate the observed world but to act as signifiers for a range of psychological conditions; the dissolving and re-forming images were meant to reflect upon the fragile and uncertain nature of human experience.

Another shift occurred in the early nineties when the artist undertook a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University - a study of Aboriginal rock art and the differences between indigenous understandings of experience and Western Scientific Rationalism.  For the next five years the artist utilised Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific drawings as a means to explore what he saw as the limitations of the Western analytical thinking.

The artist felt that as much as Leonardo dissected the body, he was also dissecting our perceptions - which eventually lead to the analytical way we interpret our world today. However, where art is concerned, he felt that this analytical process might have a ‘closing’ effect; that Western positivism might be detrimental to other more poetic aspects of our lives. Up until 2005 the artist continued to draw on the imagery and history of science and biology.

More recently the artist has drawn upon close observations of the world around us in search of some connection to the poetic, the intuitive, the unrealised. His latest 'cosmos' paintings are further incursions into the unknown, or more accurately, "the unknowable". The latest works, titled New Constellations, subtly reflect on an era defined by new symbols: the pc mouse, the DNA molecule, the Cluster Bomb. Others search the heavens for intelligent life, planets to colonise, the answer to everything.

 Human Field Painting IV 1980, 102 x 102 cm Oil on linen

writing

During the 1980s Hollingworth wrote art reviews for the Geelong Advertiser and various other essays on art and life. In 1991 he studied Foundations of Professional Writing at RMIT University which included Short Story, Non-fiction and Novel Writing.

He has since written newspaper reviews, catalogue texts, essays on art and short stories that have been published in journals such as Etchings. Tension, Dialogue, Art Monthly Australia, Asian Art News, Overland, Going Down Swinging etc.

BOOKS:

Nature Boy, 2005. A memoir about growing up a fifth generation country Victorian, discovering art and culture, and the parallels with Australia as a nation which is also going from colonialism to culture.

They called me The Wildman – The prison diary of Henricke Nelsen 2008, Murdoch pub. An historical novel, part fact, part fiction about a Swedish immigrant in the 1800s - an exact contemporary of Ned Kelly - who hid away on Mt Tallarook for fourteen years.

Smythe's Theory of Everything, 2011, Hybrid Publishers. Jack Smythe says Einstein is wrong and he has a new theory to prove it. But now at 62 he's been placed in a nursing home. Follow Jack as he recounts the comi-tragic events of his life.