View the Exhibition Catalog here.

Artist Statement

The painting is not a mirror! It does not simply reflect my thoughts and emotions, my world, or my culture. It may parallel those realities. It may have some organic relationship with those realities but, it exists in a form that has been born separate from those realities. It exists in a form that cannot be recreated or even properly described in other media. The good news is that the painting has a life of its own. But what is it saying?

I construct with a varied vocabulary of abstraction and representation, of changing styles and techniques. The imagery is discovered and replaced and often reborn. Images come like flashes and are thrown into a new world of color, mark, and surface, without full regard to their narrative implications. These stories are born of process and mood and the process gives birth to layers of association and inference, which then gives rise to narrative interpretations. The works are always narrative, inherently narrative. But what is the storytelling us?

So the painting is a visual myth, but to what end? It is a story that I initiate, but do not fully own. The characters which I have provided a stage for, are not under my control. I have given up control over these narratives. Any revelation is born during the process and lives in the work. The works are fragmented and ever-changing. The myth is odd and incomplete it would seem. Any search for universal truth seems a hopeless enterprise in this age. But the good news is that the painting still has a life of its own, and if we listen closely, maybe it does have something important to say!

The artwork of Mike Holsomback has been selected for exhibitions in such venues as the San Diego Art Institute, the University of Mobile, the Stage Gallery in Merrick, New York, the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama, Nassau College in Nassau, New York, Belmont University, Nashville, Tennessee, and StoveWorks in Chattanooga Tennessee. His paintings and collages are found in the holdings of numerous private, corporate, and government collections, including most notably, the corporate law offices of King and Spalding of Atlanta, GA, and the Park Avenue offices of Dr. Jacqueline Dryfoos of New York, NY.

Website: www.mikeholsomback.com

Instagram: @studioholsomback

Exhibition On View

Mike Holsomback

Solo Exhibition One Monkey Don’t Stop The Show

One Monkey Don’t Stop the Show unfolds somewhere between spectacle and the everyday, where performers, swimmers, animals, travelers, and other curious characters move through scenes charged with humor, color, and an underlying sense that anything might happen.

August 1st -September 6, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 1st 6:00 PM
The 109 Gallery, Historic Downtown Chickamauga, GA

Mike Holsomback’s paintings resist a fixed reading. Moving between abstraction and representation, images emerge, disappear, and return transformed through layers of color, mark, surface, and association. A motel becomes a stage. A poolside becomes theater. Familiar figures drift toward the strange. What begins as an image becomes a narrative, but one the artist deliberately leaves unfinished.

There is something wonderfully fitting in the exhibition’s title. One Monkey Don’t Stop the Show speaks to persistence, but also to the unruly nature of the the world, the studio, moments between brush stroke and the things that make up daily life.

Across more than three decades of practice, Holsomback has developed a visual language rooted in experimentation and an enduring curiosity about what painting can become. Here, storytelling is less about arriving at an answer than creating the conditions for discovery. Holsomback sets the stage, then allows the painting to take on a life of its own.

The result is a body of work that is playful without being simple, theatrical without resolving into spectacle, and narrative without telling us what to believe. We are invited to enter these strange and lively worlds, spend time among their characters, and find our own place within the story.

Curated by Leah Dalton
The 109 Gallery