From across a room, Holly Anderson’s paintings appear to swim in the brightness of a clear sky. Bursts of sunlight populate familiar subject matter – interiors, figures, skies, and water are monochromic planes pierced with white light...
Anderson's painting practice investigates sensory experiences between light and landscape. Hovering between the figurative and the abstract, raw brush strokes fragment into larger monochromatic compositions, building surfaces whose surprising flatness and geometry heightens the strangeness of their persistent realism.
Sunlight permeates an array of Holly's subject matter, with bright bursts of white negative space disrupting the order of gridded geometric surfaces. These painterly grids of stripes and squares produce complex systems that bend or scatter where bright light flashes. Familiar subjects now appear in new light, composed behind the glare of a white hot sun and developing a new visual language for the brilliance of sunlight in the Australian landscape.
Recent exhibitions include her solo exhibition Some things too bright to see at Redland Art Gallery in 2025, The Pool Show at Penrith Regional Art Gallery in 2025, and the Archibald and Wynne Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2025. Her work is held in the collection of Museum of Brisbane, Moreton Bay Council, Grafton Regional Gallery, Gadens Brisbane, and various private collections across Australia. In 2017, Anderson completed a BFA with Honours at the Queensland College of Art in Meanjin / Brisbane, where she now teaches sessionally.