Nathalie Hollis was born in 1992 in Maidstone, UK. Lives and works in London, UK

A London-based drawer, painter and print-maker, Nathalie Hollis creates with poetic, urgent, and ferocious mark-making. Formidable and evocative, Hollis’ distinctive pink and red works show bodies caught in fight or flight, motion and tension standing still, figures held in infinite disorder. Her recent pieces have translated that same, certain aliveness to the natural world, with Hollis finding in rhythmic flora a wicked and tempestuous vitality.

An alumna of the Royal Drawing School and of Camberwell College of Arts, Hollis has a studied understanding of the human body and its movement, and a profound way of expressing the union of body and being in line and colour. Lovers and fighters feature heavily in Hollis’ most prominent series of works, with figures wriggling, wrestling, threshing, dancing, and mutating together, in lucent pinks and reds.

Hollis’ use of red is important: together with the physicality and near violence in her mark-making, the red moves each strike to become the pulse of her work, willing it into living motion. Her use of pink then vivifies her figures, giving them lustrous, celestial souls above the drumbeat of bodily existence.

Often drawing from theatre, combat or performance, Hollis’ work harnesses the dynamism of life in movement, articulating on paper bodies moving in sticky synchronicity. Figures lose boundaries and transmute to new forms bound by both tension and softness. Some of Hollis’ larger pieces works are heavily layered: drawings beneath and above wrestle with each, colliding to become one whole.

To Hollis, the body is also a vehicle of expression and a site of translation. She often scores marks presenting as words, drawn in the haze of artistic reverie and unable to be literally read, speaking to the necessary ambiguity in physical expression.

In her more recent works, Hollis has been imbuing nature with the same rapacious life and animation that is characteristic of her work. Pinks, greens, and blues converge in collective motion to form wild and zealous bushes; directional, crescent-shaped lines create the heaving breathiness of grasses in the wind; and, dark, brooding marks offer officious, hungering trees.