Lots of art forms in madness is Leslie Holding’s first solo exhibition. Born in former Yugoslavia in 1952, Holding describes himself as an “abstract surrealist artist, fascinated by dreamscapes and imagery of rural and metropolitan areas.” This note serves as an apt description of the exhibition itself, which extends across all three gallery spaces at Seventh and contains a prodigious amount of work, ranging from figurative landscapes and domestic interiors to all-over compositions of geometric abstraction, laden with Holding’s idiosyncratic lexicon of motifs. As indicated by the drawing reproduced for the exhibition invitation, the show is also a demonstration of Holding’s personal belief system—what he describes as “A HUGE FINITE INCREASING ACCELERATING POWER”—in which a God and conceptions of good and evil coexist with calculations of time-travel and infinity as expressed through mathematics and physics. The works in Lots of art forms in madness are also directly informed by Holding’s experiences of “madness” and homelessness throughout his life.
Amy May Stuart is an artist living in Naarm.
