Matthew James Holman

@jess.sometimes and I wrote on The Future of Loneliness (@guts_gallery ), curated by @mia.merilu , for @ocula.art Special shout-out to @thomascameronart & @jaygardenjung More than 80 years since Edward Hopper painted his iconic image of contemporary American life, Olivia Laing wrote that ‘[w]e long for contact and it makes us afraid… [b]ut as long as we’re still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.’ If critics and commentators have presumed that the future will be a lonely place, then these artists offer recuperative models for intimacy in Laing’s sense of the word.. This isolation is often thought to be driven by new aspects of digital existence that result in less social forms of living and intimacy, as well as more collective forms of withdrawal. The Future of Loneliness revisits these anxieties whilst resisting cliche visual signifiers about failed connection. These are works that portray loneliness as stranger than we suspected: hyperreal in Lisa Liljeström’s Never Been Sacred and Tell the Truth (both 2024)—lime acrylic screenshots of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)—and hypnotic in Kate Burling’s Evaporation of Turbines (2024), where curvaceous propellers emerge out of an orange seascape that suggests? a dystopian future. It all feels at once distinctly familiar and a little different to how it has been envisaged before. The show affords an irresolute picture as to whether our lonely future is a space of delight or terror; it is vibrantly, and a little ecstatically, both.

I spoke to @corbinshaww on his new project “GOD SAVE THE TEAM”, currently on a billboard near you, for @theartnewspaper.official … Inspired by the travelling fans who write their own messages of support and local allegiances onto Saint George’s flags, and which will decorate the stands at tonight’s England fixture against Slovenia in Cologne, Shaw has repurposed the national flag with the words: ‘GOD SAVE THE TEAM.’ As the cross of Saint George, a Turkish-born Roman soldier who died in Palestine, symbolises for some a darker side to patriotism, Shaw believes that ‘this England team are a real source of pride and feel representative of a diverse nation: they are genuinely likeable, and feel like the lads I went to school with.’ Now online.

Remembering Richard Serra, now online @theartnewspaper.official

Remembering Frank Stella, now online @theartnewspaper.official

“It’s like a scene from ‘Below Deck’ envisioned by Gustave Courbet, if Courbet had a telescopic lens to prepare his pictures. These are paintings of elite luxury that never make it look like it’s worth having. It looks like hard work.” I wrote on work, wealth and painting on the French Riviera, featuring the brilliant @rexsouthwick_artist @ @kristymchanart for @plastermagazine

I interviewed @chaosursfischer on gardens, sculpture, and fearlessness. Now online @theartnewspaper.official as Urs’ new book, Monumental Sculpture, is released at Art Basel.

Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

My friend Tang Shuo’s exhibition opens this evening at Beers London — what a storyteller Our book, Shadows of Boulder Hill, is out later this month. Pre-order on the @hurtwoodbooks website @gltangshuo @beerslondon

A joyous week celebrating @secretcircuit ‘s show at @cedricbardawil

I’m in the back of a Toyota Prius on the A6010 Manchester Inner Ring Road. It’s been pissing it down for the last 20 minutes but is now easing off. As my driver pulls up to our destination, I look through damp streaks of mizzle on the window and behold the sprawling Maple Industrial Estate complex. I’ve been waiting for this moment for months. To the uninitiated eye, this place won’t look like much. The crosshatch of open concrete and cheap-brick architecture is just like any of the unremarkable estates in this neighbourhood in Ardwick, central Manchester. It’s slightly grim and certainly cold, a remnant of the city’s dwindling industrial base. But over the past three years, Maple has become a centre for British painting. As figurative art has enjoyed a resurgence in museums and markets over recent years, a particular current of hyper-real surfaces, populated by often strange, macabre and disturbing references to Old Masters and gore, has emerged in paintings by a younger generation in the North West. From London’s crisis of studio space to the widespread closure of the country’s art schools, I have a hunch that the tight-knit group working behind these walls have some secrets to share. As the sun peeked out from the clouds, and with a sense of early-career collective action in the air, I went in to find out. My piece on the Ardwick artists out now on @plastermagazine @tommyharrisonn @louise___giovanelli @robinmegannity @_nina_chua @_nicola_ellis_ @richarddeanhughes @_aliceamati @ian.hartshorne Image: Timon Benson @timonbenson Art Direction: Alexander Luc @a.luc Assistant: Henry Collier @henryjamescollier

Join us at @cedricbardawil on Sunday 2nd June from 4pm for poetry, painting, and psychedelia as part of @londongalleryweekend , featuring my friends @elcareless , @burns.william and Sam Ladkin Info here: On the occasion of Eddie Ruscha’s exhibition ‘Seeing Frequencies’ Matthew Holman will be leading a late afternoon reading, celebrating West Coast poetry, at Cedric Bardawil Gallery. In their geometries and abstractions, Ruscha’s displayed works are in conversation with the rich history of the Californian avant-garde, from Oskar Fischinger to Jordan Belson, Maya Deren to Richard Diebenkorn. Finding a poetic counterpoint to these lyrical compositions, Matthew and friends will lead a memorable summer evening of poetry, painting, and expanded consciousness. Matthew will be joined by celebrated poets and scholars Sam Ladkin, Eleanor Careless, and William Burns. Expect poems by Diane di Prima, Clark Coolidge, Barbara Guest, and much more besides. Please arrive from 4pm, readings from 4.30pm. Free, unticketed, no latecomers. I would say that California has always had me in its grip. It’s really the end of the line before time starts again. It’s got a sunset embedded in it. It also was symbolically the birth and death of counterculture starting with the acid tests and ending with Altamont (the infamous music festival which broke out into violence, resulting in one homicide and several deaths by misadventure) and the Manson Family murders. I suppose all that stuff has seeped into what I do since way back. Zap Comics, cult mythology, and Jack Parsons (rocket engineer and part of an occult movement founded by English occult writer and practitioner Aleister Crowley) all form a West Coast brew I find intoxicating. ~ @secretcircuit