IRWIN HOLLANDER

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.

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. 

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.

KIPNZ EXHIBITION:

IRWIN HOLLANDER: Art Spirit Passing (April 15 - May 14, 2023)

Exhibition Catalogue