The Hole is proud to announce our fifth solo exhibition at the gallery by New York-based artist Holton Rower. “Compression” features three major artworks from his “cutaways” series, a new type of work we are exhibiting for the first time.

Rower is an inventor and a tinkerer, a constructor and builder more than a painter; and all his works regardless of whether they go on the wall or the floor are most related to sculpture. The “cutaways” series is no exception; in the wall pieces and floor pieces Rower has made a sculptural relief of paint, many inches thick, into which he cuts a topography of mounds and shapes. As you can see in the time-lapse video below, a wall piece may contain over 100 paintings; snippets of text, repeated shapes and colors. These are all compressed into a three-dimensional “volume” of paintings that are incised. The composition of the final work is thus based on many previous decisions, all buried under layers of paint, re-emerging from selective excavation.

These “cutaways” were debuted at Venus LA earlier this year in a full show of multiple wall and floor pieces. Here we exhibit the longest piece from that show and a new partner completed recently with the same dimensions. These extreme panorama works were designed as mates in scale and palette, one featuring a cresting wave or perhaps a precipice, the other a plateau. Intervening between the paintings is a floor piece pictured above, showing how this type of “3D painting” can itself be turned into a 3D object, the shape of this work a “cliffhanger” as well.

Holton Rower was born in 1962 in New York City into a bohemian family of noted artistic legacy and grew up with a father who managed buildings and construction teams. The artistic milieu and the mobilization of workers to complete hefty construction projects both inform Rower’s studio practice. His work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations both in the U.S. and abroad, including recent exhibitions at Venus LA and Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans; and previously, at Galerie 6, Aurau, Switzerland; Galleria Maeght, Barcelona; Galerie Maeght, Paris; John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Booksellers, New York; and Cencebaugh Contemporary, New York. His work has been featured in group exhibitions, notably at the Dubai Moving Image Museum and Pace Gallery’s “Soft Machines”, as well a variety of publications and artists books, including “Cutaways” (2017), “Pours” (2012), “Scrap” (2010), “Jaw Law” (1999), and “Nettles” (1991), a book of photographs, poems and drawings, published by Flockophobic Press. Rower lives and works in New York.