If abstraction serves as a means to explore the boundless possibilities of both color and the body, then Frank Holliday’s painting is a way to construct epic metaphors of human perception. His work translates a vast range of intense sensations into pure visual language, bypassing the need for words or rational interpretation and instead striking the senses directly. Still deeply rooted in the raw yet electric East Village scene of the 1980s, Holliday’s abstractions today reflect the arc of an entire existential journey—one shaped by decades of experience, artistic evolution and the constant transformation of both his environment and his own identity.
Stepping back onto the art stage, Holliday has put together a solo exhibition that is nearing its close, unveiling for the first time a series of new works brimming with color, energy and light. “It has never been about a formula,” Holliday told Observer after the opening of “Wish You Were Here” at Swivel Gallery, a young space that recently relocated from Brooklyn to Manhattan and has built its reputation on championing emerging artists from the city and beyond. “Each painting took on its own issues that I had to mine and find a solution for.”
These works were not premeditated or strategically conceived but rather metabolized over years—accumulations of energy and experience that he poured out onto the canvas. They are raw and deeply revealing, encapsulating not just Holliday’s personal trajectory but also the shared history of a generation of artists who lived through New York’s untamed creative ferment—energies that, as Holliday suggests, many artists today feel are missing.
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There’s a direct connection here to his life in New York—particularly the experience of being bathed in artificial light for decades. “I’ve lived in New York City for twenty-five years, and I probably didn’t see the sun for twenty of those… Everything was artificially lit, and that’s part of who I am.” At the same time, his work as a teacher—engaging with younger generations of artists, many of whom come from vastly different contexts—has made him acutely aware of how the consumption of art has shifted in an era dominated by screens. “The computer has changed how we see: everything is lit from behind,” he said. “This had to be addressed in paint somehow: the light had to come from within the image.”
The works in the Swivel exhibition radiate that very idea—bursting with vibrant color, infused with contrasting energies that seem to animate them from the inside out. Much like the lights and pulsing beats of the city’s clubs once did, these paintings aim to shake today’s viewer out of a state of sensory complacency, countering the numbing effects of an overstimulated, screen-saturated world.
Holliday manifests the shiver of heightened sensations and energies, pulling us into a visceral experience that feels as tactile as it is electrifying. It’s why his works still carry such seductive physicality—one glance, and we are back in the throes of New York City’s relentless pulse, moving with him on the dance floor, surrendering to spontaneous, unfiltered reactions to light and color. His paintings demand the same raw openness to sensation that defines the most intense moments of life—sex, deep pain, death—simultaneously grounding us in our bodies and transporting us beyond the limits of the physical world.
Here, his vital energy is transferred onto the surface in sweeping, passionate gestures. Each work distills a lifetime of experiences—ecstatic highs, devastating losses—absorbed and then released in rhythmic abstraction. There is something inherently performative about his process, a theatricality that shouldn’t come as a surprise given his background in theater. For Holliday, the canvas is another kind of stage, an arena where he moves instinctively, responding in real time, letting each composition unfold like an improvised scene. “I want to be present. I want the canvas screaming, ‘Frank was here,’” he said. “I was looking at Velázquez at Prado, and you can still feel his hand. Like he just put down the brush.”
His approach is physical and immediate. He steps toward the painting, sees the next move and makes his mark. But then, as he put it, something shifts—a drip alters the composition, a gesture forces an unexpected response. “At one point, you’re pushed out of the painting, but you must find a way to return. You’ve changed that, and now you have to look at it, and it changes you.”
Flaming abstractions surge across Holliday’s canvases, connecting psychic and somatic realms while fully embracing Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital—the vital force of creativity inherent in all living things, driving perpetual evolution. “I have certain gestures that I come back to, that are mine, that my body naturally takes, and are part of a code of expression by now for me,” he said. Following this mysterious choreography, the élan vital courses through the tides of paint, flooding the surface instinctively and unfolding in an unexpected, uncontrolled evolution. “I’m interested in being a part of this that ends up with an and with some weird narrative. I had to pay attention to it and find a way to include all the painters I love. I had to find a way to free myself from all those rules.”
Holliday is just as fascinated by the act of seeing itself: “When we see something, everything else out of our focus is blurred.” His paintings deliberately engage and challenge the viewer’s perception, playing with the mechanics of optics and cognition. “I’m always trying to bring you into some visual perception dynamics. You’re looking to a color that is reacting with your eye, but you’re also simultaneously desperately looking for an image.” Figures emerge from this turbulence, only to be swallowed again by the surging tides of paint. Without dictating meaning, Holliday allows the viewer to struggle, to be drawn in and out of the canvas in a continuous search for meaning. “I’m gonna give you enough to make your meaning from it, from what it activates in you,” he added, recalling how he and Keith Haring once studied semiotics together to understand the mechanisms of visual communication.
Through layers of physical, psychological and symbolic color, he interrogates the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment, echoing the theories of Merleau-Ponty. The experience can be vertiginous, a sensory freefall that demands surrender. “I do want a sense of the figure. I want a sense of the landscape, a sense of the figure dancing, a sense of the forest in the background. But I also want the light to be like you’re on acid so that it’s not only an authentic experience but also one of understanding the body and its relational surroundings—which is what guides the best abstraction. A painting has simply to become itself.”
Club 57 and the party before the funeral
While Holliday was deeply embedded in the thriving East Village community of the 1980s, his artistic trajectory unfolded on a distinctly different path from that of his friend Keith Haring. Unlike Haring’s signature pop-infused visual lexicon, Holliday carved out a rhythm of his own—one rooted in raw painterly experimentation and an unrelenting pursuit of abstraction. Notably, he was among the founding members of Club 57 (1978-1983), a renegade artists’ underground initiative that quickly became the beating heart of New York City’s alternative nightlife.
Housed in a modest church basement at 57 St. Marks Place, Club 57 began as a no-budget venue for music, film screenings and art exhibitions, attracting a restless mix of emerging artists, musicians and performers. More than just a gathering spot, it became a catalyst for an interdisciplinary ethos that would reshape the creative landscape of the time. A laboratory of extreme experimentation, the club nurtured key artistic innovations that continue to reverberate in contemporary art today. Its legacy was cemented with the 2018 MoMA exhibition “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983,” the first major institutional survey to fully explore the groundbreaking, genre-defying energy of this seminal alternative space.
“There was Studio 54, but there were only real successful people,” Holliday recalls. “Club 57 started because no one else would show us, so we created our own space in a church basement. It was very DIY. We were throwing an art show, then a performance, an anorexia party. We were just having fun and making fun of everything,” he told Observer, clearly nostalgic for a city scene that no longer exists. “In New York, we were kids and misfits from all over the world. You felt that you could come here, hide and live your life on your own terms because nobody wanted to be here.”
The club first played host to punk bands like the Misfits before shifting its focus toward avant-garde events, including performances curated by artists like Ann Magnuson. It became a magnet for the city’s underground pioneers, with regulars such as Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Klaus Nomi and Cyndi Lauper shaping its irreverent, anything-goes atmosphere.
Then, seemingly overnight, Club 57’s underground energy began to break into the mainstream. “People started to be picked up from there. Basquiat got picked by Anina Nosei, Haring got picked by Tony Shafrazi and Kenny Scharf found his way shortly after,” Holliday said. At that pivotal moment, while many of his contemporaries were being swept into the commercial art world, he instead left for Europe—missing that momentum in New York but forging an artistic language uniquely his own.
During the Club 57 era, Frank Holliday’s practice was characterized by much more conceptual and provocative themes—he’d work on entirely black paintings or his “vampire mirrors,” dark dystopic installations of silently austere black monoliths made of wax and pigments. “I was already anticipating the black death, which was coming. Instead, they were still painting about the party before the funeral,” Holliday mused. The AIDS crisis was by then just around the corner, and it would be a tragedy that would cut close to Holliday, changing everything. “AIDS was a tough time, but I painted through it all. I’m lucky that I did because now I can make these works.”
In the present, a creative renewal
Ultimately, Holliday’s abstractions are like phoenixes—energies reemerging, burning brightly once more after devastation. His canvases are the product of a cathartic process of transformation and healing, pursued relentlessly over the years. “My art stands for freedom. I’ve worked to try and make it as free and specific as possible,” said the artist, who, at this stage in his career, can arguably disregard fleeting trends. His work serves as both a testament to the raw, untamed energies that once made New York a crucible of artistic vitality and an urgent call to shake things up again—to confront the sublime and destruction with both terror and awe. Holliday’s paintings demand that we feel something deeply, that we rediscover our senses and creative drive in order to reimagine a new world as the old order collapses in flames. In the torrential waves of color surging across his canvases, his abstractions occupy a liminal space between hell and paradise, eros and thanatos, ecstasy and suffering.
“I always joke that the world is going to blow up soon. But isn’t it beautiful?” he said. “That destruction is terrifying, but it also generates awe. Everything is burning again in front of me, and that is how my translation of what is happening is.” And yet, Holliday’s art never succumbs to despair. Instead, it celebrates the élan vital, that vital force of renewal and resistance necessary for survival—to bring New York back to what it once was. Life itself, after all, is a ceaseless negotiation between opposing forces—creation and destruction, joy and tragedy—along with all the unnameable emotions in between that, together, make existence meaningful.
Frank Holliday’s “Wish You Were Here” is on view at Swivel Gallery in New York through February 21.
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