532 Gallery is pleased to announce HUDSON RIVER , an exhibition of recent paintings by London-based artist Danny Rolph. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery.

Rolph is exhibiting for the first time a new body of work made over the last two years of his signature Triplewall paintings. These new works develop the intellectual and visceral panache of earlier paintings and open up to the viewer new pictorial encounters.

The exhibition’s title HUDSON RIVER has both historic and topographic resonance for the artist. It is also the title of the largest painting in the show, a diptych, measuring 213 x 366cms. A tour de force, this painting contains many references to the river’s history, its peoples and the great bridges that span it. An overtly Abstract work, it nonetheless also references turbulent waves and marine crafts across the picture plane. A frequent visitor to the USA since 1989, he has long wanted to make a body of work that communicates his curiosity with and respect for American culture and in particular, the region in and around New York. 

Unlike the Nineteenth Century Hudson River school of Painters, Rolph’s new paintings do not attempt to idealise nature, instead there is an appreciation for its ruggedness and sublimity within all of the work. This is a contemporary practise that uses color, drawing and collage to create multi-faceted depictions of places and specific memories experienced in his 32 years of visits. In Martin Holman’s insightful text to accompany this exhibition, he writes “There is a no denying that this painting is full of information, Rolph’s “Hudson River” is about movement so that ‘beauty’ is defined by jazzy patterns and sensed within subtle colors that fizz with allusion”. Memories of live music and clubbing in New York have also played a major part in Rolph’s most recent visual outcomes. There are many references across these paintings to specific musicians he admires, such as George Benson and Theolonius Monk, who is acknowledged in the title of the second largest work HACKENSACK (PIANO), his 1965 album.

All of these new paintings excite and arouse, with a positive energy, particularities of life experienced, colliding with Art History (think Matisse color and Picasso inventiveness), Rolph continues to explore new visual territories, achieving compelling open ended outcomes.