Evan Holloway

Evan Holloway (born 1967) is an American artist. Holloway received his BFA in 1989 and his MFA in 1997 from the University of California (Los Angeles and Santa Cruz). He lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.^[1]

Evan Holloway is represented by The approach in London, Harris Lieberman in New York and Xavier Hufkens in Brussels.^[2]

Style

Since first exhibiting in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Evan Holloway has earned a reputation as one of the most inventive sculptors of his generation. Looking at the legacies of modernism, while also engaging ideas and methods from a diverse range of cultural sources, Holloway's sculptures are a corporeal amalgamation of mathematical, alphabetical, and geometric systems, colour spectrum charts, and 3D diagrams of social structures that are simultaneously comic, delicate, brute, skeptical, and earnest.^[3]

Evan Holloway makes playful use of materials to arrive at sculpture in which formal and political interests intertwine and establish a balance between a critique of modernist conventions and a carefully calibrated satirical social commentary. Evan Holloway's sculptures combine the abstract and linear with the figurative. Inspired by music and colour theory, economics and mathematics, Evan Holloway creates distinctive, often elegant and sometimes strange forms that constantly make reference to the history of 20th century sculpture. His sculptures are often suspended from the ceiling, hovering like large mobiles above the gallery floor and, as in Untitled 2003, incorporate an assemblage of elongated faces modeled in hobby plaster and intricately painted in a variety of doleful expressions, a characteristic of his work. These figurative elements are attached to the formal, abstract, structures that make up the other portion of the sculpture. In Capital 2005, nude male figures replace the faces in Untitled 2003 as the figurative elements placed in juxtaposition with the linear structure. Compared to the faces, the figures featured in Capital are less individualized; they are submissively and comically posed on their backs and fronts and attached to each other by a network of bent metal rods. Each of the little figures is connected to the rods at its mouth and anus, and their gridded home is roughly coated with brown paint resembling fecal matter. Evan Holloway’s sculpture poses formal questions about scale, colour, line, shape and symmetry while at the same time making references to popular culture, historical narratives and social ideologies.^[4]

Holloway describes his interest in the physical presence of his sculptures within a specific space, and the way in which they directly confront the viewer, as ‘The Analogue Counterrevolution’. He believes that we still respond to a world of real physical objects, rather than to pure information, data and statistics.^[5]

frieze's Sally O'Reilly describes Holloway's work:

"Evan Holloway’s work requires the viewer to crouch, peer or circumnavigate each piece. The reward is a glimpse of a spatial, optical or notional somersault. His objects are like compounds with a long-forgotten use, outlandish yet made up of tantalizingly familiar components, all twisted or going off at angles in a most obstreperous manner. Holloway sprinkles Modernist references throughout his work like cheap cologne, and these welded formal structures act as branches or shelves on which to hang his set of preoccupations. Yet it is difficult to pare the residue of Modernism away from the scatter of contemporary cultural references. It is not easy to see which came first, as he has managed to intertwine the two in a seamless, symbiotic coupling."^[6]

Exhibitions, awards, collections

His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions, including the 2002 Whitney Biennial; the 2008 California Biennial; The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; All of This and Nothing at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Moby Dick and Wizard of Oz, both at CCA Wattis Institute, CA. In 2008 Holloway had a solo exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA.^[7]

The artist's work has also been exhibited at leading art institutions in Europe, including Beaufort 03 in Belgium, W139 in Amsterdam, the Musée Departemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart in France, the Castello di Rivoli in Torino and The Barbican in London.^[8]

Holloway has been the recipient of a number of awards including: FOCA Grant (2005), Penny McCall Foundation Award (2004) and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2002).

Notable collections include: Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; and Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA.

Selected publications

• Evan Holloway, London: Ridinghouse, 2012.^[9]
• Trees Heads Molds, Brussels: Xavier Hufkens, 2012.^[10]
• Sculpture Today, London & New York: Phaidon Press, 2010.
• LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005.

References

External links

• The approach Artist Page
• Even Holloway at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
• Harris Lieberman Artist Page
• Evan Holloway on Artnet
• Evan Holloway on Artist Pension Trust