About the work

Holtzman’s paintings are heavy, figuratively and literally, done in oil on amply sized slabs of marble and framed by thick planks of chestnut, sourced from old barns, which make it easier for him to move the works around in his studio. His palette is melancholy, full of dank purples, indigos, and bottle greens. Crimsons and oranges show up as well, but they, too, are dark, moody—as though dredged through soil and ash…

…Holtzman’s tastes in decor tend toward the fabulously unfashionable, and one can say the same of his painting. All of his images feel as though they’ve been touched by those outliers of modernism—the occultists, the mystics, the fanatics—who cycle in and out of vogue: Morris Graves, Alfred Jensen, Wolfgang Paalen, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Mark Tobey, to name just a handful. It makes sense that Holtzman absorbed the sun-kissed environs of Hydra and transformed them into the most caliginous sections of Hades—after all, he helped rough up the polite world of interior design, allowing it to become weirder, sexier, gnarlier. But I’m glad he’s now exploring the interiors of his own marvelous psyche and once again introducing us to spaces that are truly extraordinary.

-Excerpt from Alex Jovanovich, “Reviews: Joseph Holtzman at Parker Gallery.” Artforum (March 2021), accessed online.

About the artist

JOSEPH HOLTZMAN (b. 1957 Baltimore, MD) lives and works near Chatham, NY. He has developed a highly distinctive visual language that draws equally from his expertise in the decorative arts and historic textiles as it does from art history, literature, friends and personal influences. Painting on polished slate or marble, surfaces favoured by the artist for its simultaneous ability to absorb and reflect light, Holtzman—who is largely self-taught—approaches his paintings with zeal, creating abstract tableaux with loosely figurative motifs that relish in color, texture and pattern. Often installed in a Gesamtkunstwerk environment, his paintings can be seen as the cumulative result of decades spent thoroughly absorbing an encyclopedic inventory of visual delights. 

Holtzman was the founder, creative director, and publisher of Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors (1997-2004), the incessantly innovative and widely revered design magazine dedicated to idiosyncratic interiors. In 2004, Holtzman shuttered the magazine to focus full-time on his painting, and in 2014 presented his first solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which traveled to the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.