HOLLY FREAN
13–25 November 2023, 10.00–17.00
Private View: Please email us for more details.
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“These faces look as if there’s nothing going on, but to me there’s everything going on,” says Holly Frean, describing the blank-faced portraits that feature in her new solo exhibition Heads. Known in recent years for her witty grids of small, perfectly judged paintings, which have often featured engagingly characterful animals, the new work is a step change in subject matter, process and, perhaps most crucially, ambition. Frean is serious about the business of painting, talking with passion and erudition about all the formal elements that go into making a painting ‘work’. “In a sense it doesn’t matter who or what the portrait is of, it could be a chicken or a dog or a celebrity. Their ‘themness’ comes through if you get all the ingredients working right. There’s a feeling of flow when everything aligns: colour, tone, line, form, texture, scale, composition, space. And I wanted to get back to the last show I did that made 100% sense”, she explains, “when I could stand in front of it and say ‘This is me’.”
That show, a decade ago, was called Before and After in which Frean imagined the moment before or after a famous piece of art was made. “And now I’m diving again into the paintings and artists that I really love, the pictures I go back to all the time to look at colour, how an artist paints light, or hair, or buttons, whatever it is. I wanted to go back to the source, the things that feed me and keep me interested, which are portraits.”
Frean’s ‘bible’ is a well-thumbed copy of Phaidon’s 500 Self-Portraits, written by her old tutor, which documents portraiture from ancient Egypt to the present day, from early religious paintings through to the simplified, flat portraits of the early Renaissance and on to the era of the Camera Obscura, when artists developed ways of seeing light and shade and portraits became more realistic. This tome is the starting point for Frean’s new body of work - augmented by copious further research, trips to galleries and online delving: a fixed point from which to explore and experiment in a space that hovers between portrait and painting.
After studying at Camberwell School of Art and City & Guilds Art School, Frean started out as a portrait painter. So the new work is, in a sense, a return to her roots, the road not taken, albeit in a very different form. Because these portraits are almost anti-portraits, distilling the subjects into abstractions of form and colour, but with no facial features at all. Heads, yes, but no faces. Why? “I just don’t want to spend time on the details,” she explains with disarming directness. “I worked out I could pull enough information from a subject and find something alive and beautiful, without getting bogged down by moles and eyelashes,” adding that she has no interest in simply producing less-good versions of great portraits or anything that teeters too close to a pastiche.
Frean is most interested in responding to the original portrait itself rather than the personality of the sitter. Clearly the two are intertwined at the deepest level, but for her the challenge and the pleasure is all about the filtering of visual information and meaning from that first sitting, which took place often several hundred years earlier, to Frean working in her studio today: “Originally there was an actual person sitting in a room with an actual artist, who spent time painting a portrait of them. Then that work was hung on the wall and looked at for generations, and eventually photographed by someone and reproduced in a book or on a postcard, and then I’ve looked at it in 2023 and thought about it and interpreted it through the filter of my eyes and brain and hand and this is the result. It’s not really the essence of a person I’m interested in, I’m just allowing the distilling of a painting to happen.”
All of which sounds terribly earnest, but doesn’t communicate the sheer pleasure, energy and playfulness – always knocking about in Frean’s work – on show here. She is having a ball and she’s excited. A large part of that derives from the spirit in which she has approached the new work. It is, in the best possible way, experimental. She is trying new ideas, accidentally alighting on things that please her along the way, rejecting those that don’t, disappearing down rabbit holes of 17th century dress or the history of masks or nun’s wimples, and returning with nuggets of visual brilliance. She is also using house paint for the first time, which she is finding surprisingly liberating (“It’s like being on holiday, someone has already mixed the colours, my job is working out how I’m going to use them”). And, perhaps most thrillingly, after years of working in miniature, she is working at vastly different scales, with large canvases sitting alongside tiny 10 x 11cm portraits and delicately balanced grids.
Frean’s work always hovers between well-honed, technical control, and something a little freer and more subversive. It is that tension that is in evidence in this body of work. The trademark wit is there - whether that is in a grid of paintings of backs of heads of famous self-portraits or the pack of cards of nuns - but there is also a bold, unleashed energy, especially in the larger pieces. There is also simply an explosion of work: 600 paintings, ranging from the smallest pieces (on plywood, which she layers with gesso, then sands before painting) to enormous canvas heads, which are a complete departure for her. “I haven’t painted like this before. I really wanted to challenge myself. It feels big. With these I am not working from the original image, but from my smaller distillation of it. So I’ve already worked out how I see it, how I interpret it. The challenge is translating that at scale. The process is physically very different, different tools, different energy. I have to wake up feeling fighty, up to it.” When the source material is as famous as the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the pressure is perhaps all the greater.
Sitting in her studio, spotting favourites amongst the smaller ‘heads’, which are velcroed to the walls all around us, so she can play with the colour and balance of the grids, “like arranging sweeties”, Frean sounds as if she is talking about old friends. She disappears momentarily to bring in a larger piece she is not yet happy with (Elizabeth I is proving as challenging as her reputation might suggest). And in a sense, old friends is what they are. These artists and paintings have lived in her imagination for a long time - El Greco, Barucci, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Velasquez through to more modern masters - Cezanne, Van Gogh, Augustus John, Frida Kahlo, Paula Rego. For Holly Frean, as an artist with a deep love of the craft of painting, alongside any loftier ideas, there could be no finer tribute to her heroes, and the art of painting itself, than this exciting new show.
- Gill Morgan, September 2023
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2022 Dog solo exhibition, The Kennels at Goodwood, West Sussex; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (also 2020, 2017 & 2014); The Dog Show, Brighton; Dogs solo exhibition, The Gallery at Green & Stone, London; 2021 online launch of two limited edition prints titled Dog Rainbow 1 & 2 sell out in under an hour with £4k of the proceeds going to Battersea Dogs Home, Pets As Therapy, Wild At Heart Foundation & Canine Partners UK; The Cat Art Show 4, Los Angeles, California, USA; 2020 Charleston Inspires art auction curated by Emily Maude, Sussex; self-published Covid Dogs: A Diary; 2019 Art, Objects & Curiosities Paul Smith’s flagship store on Albemarle Street, London; Cabinet Chelsea Arts Club, London; Holly Frean/Recent Work solo exhibition, Zimmer Stewart Gallery, Sussex; 2018 Secret Charter Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; Objects of Desire The New Craftsmen, London; Holly’s Ark solo exhibition, Zimmer Stewart Gallery, Sussex; 2017 ING Discerning Eye (also 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012 & 1997); 2016 invited by The New Craftsmen to take part in Burberry’s Maker’s House during London Fashion Week to live-paint miniature portraits of celebrities and other visitors; launched Holly’s Ark ceramic plates and opened The Holly Frean Shop online; The Holly Frean Collection, the first of several collaborations with British interior designers Andrew Martin, launches at Maison+Objet in Paris, France; Who’s Counting solo exhibition of paintings and mobiles, Paul Smith as above; 2015 Hat Tricks workshop commissioned by Bridgeman Art Library for Wilderness Festival; Poker Face solo exhibition, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, New York, USA; 2014 Fowl Play solo exhibition and homewares launch, Anthropologie on Kings Road, London; 2012 Before/After Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London; invited by Fabergé to paint one of 200 giant eggs, curated and auctioned by The Big Egg Hunt, a London charity raising money for The Elephant Family and Action For Children; 2008 Get Ready solo exhibition, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London; One and Other solo performance for Anthony Gormley’s plinth in Trafalgar Square, London; 2007 Initia Nova Chelsea Arts Club, London; 2006 Holly Frean solo exhibition, Zimmer Stewart Gallery, West Sussex; 2005 exhibiting with Cavaliero Finn, also Woolf Gallery; 2004 Me You He She We You They solo exhibition, The Gallery, Shepherds Market, London; 2003 Urban Sites solo exhibition, The Troubadour Gallery, London; Building Sites solo exhibition, Berlin, Germany; 2002 BA Fine Art degree show, City & Guilds of London Art School; 1999 Oxford Brookes University (BA Architecture)
*excludes international art fairs
Prizes & Awards: Lawrence Alkin Painting Prize (2015); National Open Art Competition Painting Prize (2012); shortlisted for the Sainsbury Scholarship and the Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship in Portraiture at the British School at Rome (2008); Scholarship holder at the Guild of Fishmongers (2002); William Pardoe Watercolour Prize (2002); Peter Connard Travel Award (2001)
Private Collections: Duke of Richmond; Duchess of Northumberland, Lord Mervyn of Abersoch, Paul Smith CBE, Betty Jackson CBE, Kit Kemp MBE; Alan Duncan MP; Larry David, Russell Howard, Ricky Gervais, Lee Evans, Russell Tovey, Johnnie Boden
Galleries representing Holly Frean: Air Contemporary, London; USA; Blueprint Gallery, Dallas, Texas, USA; Mylo Art, Hampshire; Grandy Art, London; Zimmer Stewart Gallery, Sussex; Cavaliero Finn, London.
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Please email thegallery@greenandstone.com with the NUMBER and TITLE of the artwork(s) you would like to enquire about.
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Join us at the Gallery at Green & Stone for an exclusive opportunity to have you, a loved one or even a four-legged friend painted by Holly Frean.
Taking place at the end of November, this could be a perfect and unique Christmas present for a friend or family member.
With only 14 spaces available, contact us now to book your 30-minute portrait session.
Online Catalogue
Please find a selection of the works that will be on show in the gallery from 14–25 November 2023. If you would like to purchase a work, please email thegallery@greenandstone.com with the ARTIST NAME and TITLE of the artwork(s) you are interested in.
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If you have any further questions, or would like to speak to a member of the gallery team, please email thegallery@greenandstone.com.
