Harold Hollingsworth
Harold Hollingsworth
Harold Hollingsworth is a Seattle-based painter whose abstract work develops from close observation of the visual environment. Weathered signage, layered posters, typography, painted walls, fragments of advertising, and incidental marks encountered throughout the city become source material for paintings in which graphic forms are detached from their original meanings and reconstituted through color, line, and scale.
Hollingsworth builds his surfaces through accumulation and revision. Translucent passages, solid fields of color, repeated marks, and partially obscured forms create a sense of movement and spatial depth, with earlier layers remaining active beneath the surface. His longstanding interest in typography and found graphics has gradually expanded into a more distilled abstract language, while retaining the evidence of the urban environment from which it originates. For Hollingsworth, Seattle functions as an ongoing collaborator: a changing archive of images and surfaces gathered through attentive looking and returned to repeatedly in the studio.
A Seattle native, Hollingsworth graduated from Western Washington University in 1989, where he studied with artist R. Allen Jensen. He has presented seventeen solo exhibitions and participated in more than thirty-eight group exhibitions, with work shown in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Berlin.
Selected Collections
His work is held in private and corporate collections including Nordstrom, Target Corporation, Twitter, Hilton Hotels, and Swedish Medical Center.