GEOFFREY HOLDER Curated by Erica Moiah James

James Fuentes is thrilled to present the first solo exhibition of works by Geoffrey Holder in Los Angeles, curated by Erica Moiah James. Holder’s work will also be on view at Frieze Los Angeles, Booth D11, February 29–March 3, 2024. Paintings by Geoffrey Holder and his older brother Boscoe Holder will be shown together for the first time at Victoria Miro, London, June 1–July 27, 2024.

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago in 1930, Geoffrey Holder’s prodigious and multi-disciplinary career was underpinned by his practice as a painter. Spanning over five decades of his artistic practice, this exhibition presents a selection of Holder’s earliest paintings from the 1950s alongside works made throughout his life and into the 2000s. The artist’s oeuvre demonstrates a deep interest in representing the totality of black life, registered here in compositions that move from the quiet intimacy of bedrooms and parlors to the lively energy encountered in city streets and nightclubs. Anchored in portraiture, at times Holder’s images are also steeped in religious iconography and a bold reverence for nature—consummately rendered in such a way that they appear at once contemporary, historical, and thus timeless. 

From the beginning, Holder’s creativity was inspired by the support of his family. Following the example of his older brother, Boscoe, a leading artist and performer, Geoffrey declared himself an artist at the age of seven. When Boscoe left for London in 1950 Geoffrey took over his dance troupe. In 1953, during his early twenties, Holder relocated from Trinidad to New York City. The move was financed by the sale of a group of his paintings—exemplified by Untitled (1952), depicting two calypso dancers in Holder’s signature style, which emerged during that decade in work is both tender and strong, displaying his deeply intuitive understanding of color, used to powerfully describe emotion as much as form. Holder opened his first solo exhibition in New York in January, 1954, at the Barone Gallery, presenting works directly inspired by his life in Trinidad. By 1956 his work as a painter was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship. Also made during Holder’s first decade in the United States, Woman in Red Dress in Forest (c. 1957-1960) affirms a diasporic truth and connection to the beauty of his home and the natural world in a manner that evokes memory—an enduring theme in his life’s work. 

In New York, Holder found a muse in his wife-to-be, the distinguished dancer, actress, and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade to whom he proposed days after their first meeting. The couple married in 1955. Throughout their world travels—including a period spent in Paris working with Josephine Baker—wherever home was, they also transported their studio and salon. Eventually settling into a loft on lower Broadway, which also became home to their extraordinary personal art collection, visitors included friends and admirers alike, such as the performer Lena Horne and painters Alice Neel and Francis Bacon. 

In life and in work, de Lavallade remained a key inspiration to Holder. Aspects of her features, posture, and presence imprinted on the painter’s memory, entering not only his various portraits of her, but across many other works—consciously or unconsciously—as a kind of ideal female image. In addition to muses conjured from his own life, Holder’s work recalls formal elements of Baule sculpture and the African inspired Modernism of artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Alberto Giacometti. A deeply spiritual person who studied and drew on various faiths, Holder’s works also reflect his unique and personal cosmology. Afro-Caribbean and African practices as well as canonical Christian narratives are transmitted through his expansive imagination. In works like Maria Virginia (1983), Nativity (n.d.), Last Mac (2004), and Adam and Eve (c. 2000-2005), Holder’s distinct aesthetic, art historical, spiritual, and personal motifs meet with his sense of style, wry humor, and corporeal observations.

Holder’s attunement to beauty imbued much of his portraiture with a mysterious quality—likely amplified by the fact that most of his figures were painted from imagination rather than life. Holder engaged the body as if it were a paintbrush or pen; his choreography resembled movements like brushstrokes and, in turn, his paintings reflected an intimate physical sensibility. For Holder, painting provided fertile terrain for his astonishing experimentations in style, representation, and expression. To this day, Holder’s work remains as contemporary as when it was made.

James Fuentes wishes to thank Carmen de Lavallade and Leo Holder.