"Spanning the early-1980s onward, the exhibition spotlights Holder's recurring series of nightlife paintings, which pay homage to the artist's youngest memories of Trinidadian dancehalls. These spaces of music, movement, and collective joy sparked Holder's earliest imagination and remained foundational threads in his later work. Saturday Night traces this enduring influence and highlights Holder's own lasting impact on New York's dance and cultural landscape."
"In the dancehall works, figures emerge through low light and color with a quiet intensity, rendered with the same refined physical awareness that defined Holder's choreographic approach. While his portraits often stage individual, isolated figures-with context rendered only through the attitude and elegance of their bearing-the dancehall paintings situate these energies within a social field. That moment of intimate attention becomes collective as figures gather in motion within a charged environment,"
Saturday Night runs November 12 through December 20 in New York and presents Geoffrey Holder's recurring nightlife paintings spanning the early 1980s onward. The paintings pay homage to Holder's earliest memories of Trinidadian dancehalls, sites of music, movement, and collective joy that shaped his imagination. Holder was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1930 and declared himself an artist at age seven; his parents met in a dancehall and those gatherings informed his sensory study of rhythm, relation, and style. Holder relocated to New York in 1953 after selling paintings and built a multidisciplinary career, with painting remaining his most constant practice. The dancehall works render figures through low light and color with refined physical awareness, transforming individual presence into a social field where movement operates as a shared language.
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