Standing before an alluring, enigmatic abstraction by Gwen Hollingsworth is like happening upon an idyllic glade in a midnight forest. It might take a moment to make sense of what you’re seeing, but soon enough, the moonlight reveals you’ve found an enchanted place.
Magic is a real medium for Hollingsworth, whose debut solo show, “Walking in Circles in the Night,” is on view at New York’s island gallery through February 15th. There, Hollingsworth pairs painting prowess and spirituality to cast what she calls “visual spells.”
“I don’t actively do that in all of my work,” Hollingsworth noted in an interview at her studio, 28 floors up in 4 World Trade Center, where she is concluding a residency with Silver Art Projects. “Walking in Circles in the Night” caps off her past year exploring New York and the possibility of “using painting as a means of conjuring energy.”
When she was growing up, the landscape of Pasadena, California—from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and all the wildflowers and succulents in between—inspired her to paint nature rather than narrative.
Hollingsworth earned her BA from UCLA in 2020, amid societal uncertainty, an internet-fueled uptick in neopaganism, and renewed interest in magic in art. Hollingsworth told Artsy that around that time, “I started thinking a lot about death, memento mori, and life cycles—and night as this temporal, spatial equivalent of all those things.” The following year, she embraced her Buddhist upbringing, and started studying Taoism. In the process, Hollingsworth began regarding landscapes not just as a means of representing her emotions, but as containers for action—and embodiments of Chinese cosmology’s oft-overlooked, feminine yin energy.
According to this philosophy, yin is receptive. As such, it might not look at first like anything is happening in the six jewel-toned canvases in Hollingsworth’s show. Their scenes take time to resolve, allowing the viewer’s subconscious mind to project details that even the artist herself hadn’t fathomed.
But, these paintings aren’t entirely abstract. After laying down her solid, dark, monochromatic underpaintings, establishing each work’s emotional tone, Hollingsworth sets about “putting light back into the canvas,” she said. To that end, she subtly crafts the sylvan scenes—which appear to her during meditations—out of thin layers of paint with lavender spike oil.
Hollingsworth has also spent the past year researching Jungian psychology and contemporary sigils. Her work bears a distinct symbolic lexicon. Recognizable accents like claw marks and ripples reappear across Light in the Clearing (all works 2024) and Night Steals the Colors of the Day, for instance—far clearer than the forests and gardens beneath them. Such motifs tether these abstract scenes to reality for both Hollingsworth and her viewers. “I also like the adaptability of that gesture,” she added, “them being like actual claw marks, like thorns, like shoots coming out of the ground.”
Nonetheless, Hollingsworth vastly prefers hazy gradations and ambiguity to clear-cut contours. Thus, her paintings’ strong, solid edges feel surprising. Leaving their borders untouched “ends the illusion somehow,” she thinks. This detail also strengthens the impression that these works are portals, wedging open energetic doors by straddling dichotomies like yin and yang, and abstraction and figuration. “I’m really interested in exploring that in-between space when things become blurred, or possibilities are endless,” Hollingsworth said.
She plans to continue this past year’s supernatural research. “I want to make a couple of protection spells,” she said, perhaps a few more paintings like Spirits in the Field, which she sees as “giving those entities a home.” Nonetheless, Hollingsworth doesn’t believe art has to “do” anything. “Walking in the Circles in the Night” offers an opportunity for pause—an equally important ingredient for good magic.