KIPNZ is pleased to announce Irwin Hollander: Art Spirit Passing, an exhibition of Irwin Hollander’s paintings and works on paper produced during his time in Wells Bridge, NY.

Irwin Hollander (1927-2018) is most well known for his pioneering and influential lithography practice in the 1960s and 1970s: first at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, and then under his own name, at Hollander Fine Art Printing Workshop on 10th Street in Manhattan. He worked closely with the most visionary artists of the day—Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, Eleanore Mikus, John Cage and Claes Oldenburg among them.

When Hollander moved permanently to the hamlet of Wells Bridge, New York in 1984, he spent the remaining decades of his life making his own art. While he exhibited in the region, his work is little known more widely. His prodigious output ranges from small card-sized paintings to larger-scale works on paper, panel and board and even roof tile. He used watercolor, gouache and acrylic, but also spray paint, Letraset type, rubber stamps, even ceramic glaze—as his longtime friend Elizabeth Nields recalled, “Whatever he reached for he would try. And he wouldn’t necessarily follow the rules.” 

Although he draws on his knowledge of art and art history, Hollander’s work most parallels the approach of an outsider artist. It cannot be handily defined as belonging to a particular movement or art-historical period; his artwork seems to exist in its own world. It is sometimes spare and poetic; at other times, vivid, Fauvist and surrealistic. His imagery is highly personal, often diaristic, noting places and names from the past; tropical memories of his time in the Pacific; icons of his Jewish heritage and Brooklyn upbringing. There is a sense, moreover, of travels between his own inner and outer reality: a mix of surreal and almost metaphysical characters and dimensions, infused with images of his life in Wells Bridge that become symbols and totems throughout his works: the bridge, his home, the river, the railroad. His repeated use of the term INCORPOREAL in his work underscores this feeling of free-floating, from and between place and time. 

A 40-page catalog of Hollander’s work will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition and is the first publication of KIPNZ Press.

This exhibition is a collaboration between KIPNZ and Neil and Susan Rochmis. We are also grateful to Mark Hollander and Elizabeth Nields for sharing their knowledge of Irwin Hollander and his work. 

Irwin Hollander’s lithographs can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Lilley Museum of Art.

For more information about Irwin Hollander, his 2018 obituary by Roberta Smith can be found here.

To download a PDF of the press release, please click here.