Featured image: Sunny Side, Aaron Hollingsworth, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 in. / 23.6 x 28.3 cm.
Aaron Hollingsworth’s paintings pulse with chromatic tension, memory fragments, and spatial ambiguity.
Aaron Hollingsworth creates abstract acrylic paintings that explore memory, architecture, and the poetic energy of space through bold color and layered form.
Working primarily in acrylic, he constructs abstract environments that oscillate between place and sensation. His compositions evoke dreamlike thresholds, where architectural references and personal symbolism collide in fields of saturated color. The three featured works, Land of the Living, Sometimes You Need a Sippy Cup, and Around the Corner, reveal a practice rooted in transformation, play, and emotional immediacy.
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Land of the Living, Aaron Hollingsworth, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 in. / 182.88 x 121.92 cm.
A monumental canvas, Land of the Living vibrates with architectural abstraction and electric emotion. The structure of an archway anchors the composition, while swaths of cobalt, burnt sienna, and ultramarine swirl around it in painterly tension. What appears to be a Mediterranean facade morphs into a dream-state landscape, blurring interior and exterior, memory and place. Hollingsworth’s brushwork is assertive but full of improvisational energy, suggesting that the “living” referenced here is not only a condition of breath, but of perception.
Sometimes You Need a Sippy Cup, Aaron Hollingsworth, 2023, acrylic on linen, 24 x 18 in. / 60.96 x 45.72 cm.
In contrast to his architectural works, this intimate piece centers on a single object rendered in loose, gestural line against a luminous yellow field. The object, ambiguous, playful, vaguely cup-like, hovers between childish icon and totem of survival. The cheeky title invites irony, but the saturated palette and rawness of the mark-making suggest something more primal. Hollingsworth transforms the mundane into a site of emotional resonance and latent vulnerability.
Around the Corner, Aaron Hollingsworth, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 42 in. / 121.92 x 106.68 cm.
Around the Corner feels like a recollection mid-formation, shapes barely holding, color vibrating at the edge of memory. A corridor appears, flanked by bursts of greenery and abstract gestures, as if the viewer is stepping into a liminal threshold. The work's vitality lies in its resistance to resolution. What’s around the corner remains unseen, but deeply felt. This is Hollingsworth at his most lyrical, turning spatial suggestion into metaphor.
Together, these works by Aaron Hollingsworth map out a territory where memory, architecture, and abstraction converge. His use of vivid color and fragmented form allows each painting to act as a portal, an emotional architecture through which viewers must navigate. With each gesture, Hollingsworth invites us to reimagine the spaces we inhabit, not as static settings, but as living, breathing extensions of thought and feeling.
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Peek-A-Boo Paradise, Aaron Hollingsworth, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 30 in. / 91.44 x 76.2 cm.
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