The Hole is proud to announce the second solo exhibition by Holton Rower at the gallery presenting two bodies of work side by side. Rower’s “Pour paintings” debuted here last May with a full-gallery survey of the diverse results achieved by the artist through his innovative and deceptively simple process of pouring hand-made acrylic paints over wood. In conjunction with ten new pours that elaborate upon this approach, Rower will introduce a new body of work titled “Focus paintings” that, perhaps, are equally simple in construction and complex in effect. The fact is, we do not know how the artist achieved these seemingly out of focus paintings, whether they were poured over a curved support, doused with urethane, or dried on a vibrating surface; the method of their construction will remain an artist’s secret so the viewer can focus on the visual effect they produce and their quizzical relationship to the history of abstract painting. Like the pours, that are no more like Morris Louis than like Lynda Benglis, the focus paintings are superficially somewhere in between Richter and Hirst, or perhaps even further back like a Kandinsky quivering field of pure color or Emile Nolde poppy field. The relationship between the two bodies of work is challenging as well: we here have decided that they both come from an artist who is a true “chemist of paint” and a sculptor of paint more than a traditional abstract painter.