I’ve been following artist Brady Dollyhigh for the whole of his career, which would be about four years now. The first time I wrote about him, in late 2019, he was just 19 years old and had somehow landed a solo exhibition of his ink drawings at the nonprofit Lakewood Cultural Center — not exactly the Museum of Contemporary Art, but surely a respectable place where many of the region’s best and most seasoned artists have displayed their work.
It was impossible not to pay attention and wonder where he would show up next.
The answer, it turns out, is in the commercial gallery world. Dollyhigh is back for a second major public outing this month at Bell Projects, a young and ambitious space in Denver’s City Park neighborhood.
The good news is that extending his professional reach, this time with paintings, has not ruined him or forced a pre-mature turn in his work. Just the opposite, really. The exhibition is one of the most youthful exercises I’ve seen in a commercial gallery in some time.
Here is Dollyhigh doing what artists without a lot of age or means do: getting clever, being resourceful, turning cheap materials into something interesting. He employs a lot of spray paint, uses metal road signs as canvases. The subject matter revolves around a high fantasy storyline that aptly reflects a generation influenced by things like the “Lord of the Rings” movies or narrative video games. The exhibition is action-packed, more than a little violent, and has a grandiose title: “A Hunter Named Truth.”
There is a DIY, art-school edge to it all — though it is interesting to note here that Dollyhigh never went to art school. He is self-taught and carving out his career without the usual connections.
What he does have are mentors, including gallerist Lindsey Bell, who has shaped this raw material into something that appears to be sophisticated and sellable. The paintings may be rough around the edges but they feel like commodities. That’s not a bad thing; artists need to sell work to stay viable, and it is reassuring to see a gallery developing fresh talent.
The 12 large-scale works in the exhibition each capture a scene in Dollyhigh’s dark fairytale about three characters named Beauty, Truth and The Thief. It’s an allegory, of sorts, about the impossibility of ideal beauty to survive in an ugly and practical world. Beauty is born and killed by Truth, again and again, through one grisly method or another.
The Thief watches it all from a distance “never attempting to save Beauty; only profiting from its cyclical death,” as Dollyhigh explains, somewhat cryptically, in his artist’s statement. It is easy to interpret The Thief as a stand-in for artists themselves, who, through their work, exploit beauty for pleasure and profit as a habit.
This could fall into cliche, but the artist does just enough to save himself from ruin and keep viewers tuned in. The character of Beauty, against convention, is depicted as chunky, muscular and masculine. He, or she, has thick arms and oversized hands and looks like a two-dimensional version of one of 20th-century modernist sculptor Henry Moore’s reclining nudes.
The character’s apparent strength is undermined by its ultimate victimization. We do get one painting titled “Beauty Lounging,” which has the protagonist laying on its back in peaceful repose. But we also get “The Kill,” where Beauty is being stabbed to death. Dollyhigh renders the scene in a monochromatic back-and-white — except for a blood splattering in brilliant red.
There’s also “Beauty’s Corpse” and “Beauty’s Head” and other offerings, which are not quite as brutal as their titles suggest. At one point, the artist adds a religious reference, presenting a triptych with a piece called “Beauty’s Crucifixion” in the center. For the three grouped paintings, Dollyhigh has used wood panels to extend his rectangular, salvaged metal road signs along their top edge. It gives them the appearance of the curved and pointed stained-glass windows in a gothic cathedral.
Dollyhigh imbues both high and low art references into the show. The spray paint invokes street art, but he combines it with brush-applied oil paint on every piece, a nice reference to the Old Masters. He keeps the whole assemblage grounded by letting the street signs retain their original found-object essence. He doesn’t cover up all of the letters; viewers can still read “PARKING BY PERMIT ONLY” and “ROAD CLOSED TO THRU TRAFFIC” in the background.
Letting those words show is the secret to this exhibition’s success. It breaks the fourth wall, to put it in theater terms, and connects Dollyhigh’s imaginary world to the real world. It prevents this body of work from seeming overly serious or self-indulgent, or silly and cloying in the way of one of those medieval fantasy epics, like “Game of Thrones,” which demand the suspension of reality to absurd levels.
Dollyhigh, who also borrows visual bits from a range of artists from Matisse to Basquiat, seems to know exactly what he is doing, straddling the line between elegance and earthiness, between old-school painterliness and contemporary marking, between literary traditions and pop culture trends. I want to say it is advanced work for someone so young. But it is just advanced.
If you go
Brady Dollyhigh’s “A Hunter Named Truth” continues through Jan. 29 at Bell Projects, 2822 17th Ave. It’s free. Info at bell-projects.com.
