56 Henry is pleased to present Fly by Night, an exhibition of new paintings by Braden Hollis. Fly by Night will be on view June 9 through July 30, 2023 at 56 Henry Street, and marks Hollis's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Braden has always been secretive about her paintings.  As her younger sister, I would sneak peeks of her work when I could, pulling old paintings out from closets and taking trips to her studio, feeling as though I was given access to some arcane part of my big sister. When she invited me to write about her work, I asked: “Why now?” She said, “I want you to learn a bit more about me.”

Fly by Night is a love letter to Braden’s influences. I see Peter Doig’s influence in Oakland, CA, in which a landscape of trees obscures a white building. It toes the line of abstraction, akin to experiencing a mottled memory in an altered reality. Keeping Time draws from Anne Truitt’s color blocking and the architecture of Paul R. Williams. With a staircase as the centerpiece of the painting, the stark interruption of a bird in flight tugs at your attention, destabilizing and activating the composition’s center. Despite the serenity of Braden’s surfaces, she introduces dreamlike interventions, using reference images only to disrupt them.

Bent continues a series showcasing scenes of black athleticism and leisure. It depicts a playful woman in a pinup pose set against a pastel blue background. It elicits an image from my childhood: the quaint Kennedy Tap Studio in Los Angeles where we learned tap dancing and ballet. Far from being prima ballerinas, we returned for the sense of community found in one of the few predominantly black spaces we occupied as children. There, we could move and dance freely with no limitations or concerns.

In Romance II, languid lovers embrace against a red wall. Framed by black, their embrace is tender, letting the viewer in on an intimate scene.

Of her paintings, Braden says that making them feels like “trying to choreograph a dance. You have to start with small motions.” The paintings capture fleeting moments in frozen scenes. “I think my most successful ones are the paintings where I have that space to dance in and out of the work,” she tells me. Her work appears very still at first, but motion teems below the surface, guiding her process. Many of Braden’s paintings begin with just a color in mind. From there, the work gets built up  and torn down through a series of movements, in a call and response between artist and art.

— Katherine Hollis

Braden Hollis (b. 1998, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2020. Her work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at UTA Artist Space. Hollis has been included in exhibitions at Castle Gallery, Los Angeles; Tilton Gallery, New York; Anthony Gallery, Chicago; New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles; Japanese American Cultural Community Center, Los Angeles. Hollis was selected for The Macedonia Institute residency program in 2022, and received a Sylvia Appelman Painting Award in 2019.