All Photos By Gail

One of our favorite artists that we’ve discovered at The Hole Gallery is Holton Rower, whose vibrant and visually captivating pour paintings can currently be seen at the gallery in a fun show entitled Psquirmour. For this exhibit, The Hole constructed a mini gallery within the gallery’s back room, where the exterior walls showcase a group of six new Pour Paintings, and the interior space highlights a new body of work called Squirms, which are controlled pours on a wood panel, presented more like traditional paintings in a rectilinear format.

The new Pour Paintings presented here have a undersea feeling to them; whether through their frequent blue and aqua hues, their rings of thick opalescent paint reminiscent of seashells, or their mollusk-like asymmetrical forms. The Aegean-blue carpeting of the gallery and lowered ceiling augment these underwater similarities.

The Pour Painting above is slightly different to the others in the show, in that is has a shelf-like piece attached  at the bottom (see detail photo below).

We had a chance to meet and chat with Holton at the opening reception and he offered that these new Pours are not as large as ones exhibited in his Previous 2013 Show at The Hole. But they looked pretty big to me! All of the artwork is created Holton’s downtown NYC studio.

Rower’s Squirm paintings feature thin, controlled pours that have a moving point of origin. Unlike the Pour Paintings, where all pigment is poured in the center of a plywood ground and the shape is dictated by the shape of the wood and the viscosity of the paint, these works are poured in a moving line, making a worm-like shape as the radiant color puddles bend around the plywood and overlap.

The morphing pour, contained on all sides by the plywood square, is less about chance and gravity and more of a determined composition, a line drawing if the line were a shifting pool of color. Through careful selection of color, paint type and position, these paintings are both very technical and very playful; like all of Holton’s output you get the sense of the artist as a mad inventor, making materials do new things and having a great time in the process.

Psquirmour takes place in the back gallery room in tandem with the Not a Painting Group Show, so be sure to check that out as well while you are there.

Psquirmour by Holton Rower will be on exhibit through  July 26th, 2015 at The Hole, Located at 312 Bowery at Bleecker Street in NYC.