Evan Holloway Exhibition

Evan Holloway Exhibition

Paula Cooper Gallery "534 W 21 St."

This event has ended.

Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of recent work by Evan Holloway. The exhibition will be the artist’s first one-person show in New York since 2010, and his first with Paula Cooper Gallery.

As an iconic Los Angeles-based artist, Evan Holloway creates work that engages modernist assumptions about sculpture by reintroducing representational content, unpolished craftsmanship, as well as notions of banality, repurposing and decoration in his work. With forebears as disparate as Barbara Hepworth, Ree Morton, Eva Hesse, Claes Oldenburg and Charles Ray, Holloway engages material and engineering with his distinct idiosyncratic intuition.

Holloway’s ongoing series of abstract tree sculptures are assembled from found branches that have been cast in bronze and painted in a system of vibrant hues. Rearranged at consecutive right angles, the branches pierce through space to form a complex web of rectangles, recalling sculptors such as Ibram Lassaw, Mark di Suvero and Richard Stankiewicz. The largest of these on view, Late Afternoon (2017), echoes the compositional footprint of Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning (1962) and balances extended weight with organic directionality. Another ongoing series of Holloway’s uses discarded batteries, collected by the artist in an effort to repurpose the environmentally hazardous waste. Inserting one end of the batteries into plaster “sausages” that are then stacked vertically on steel rods, Holloway creates a sinuous, prickled biomorphic form, at once both familiar and enigmatic. With this gesture, he extends the intentional life of the battery that literally leaks poison into the sculptures while simultaneously energizing them with textural and optical vitality.

A more recent body of work, Holloway’s painted papier-mâché recreations of potted plants and lamps play upon their mundane ubiquity to expand the limits of a sculptural tableau. The implied biochemical relationship between light and plant activates the negative space and narrates the scene. Yet their meticulous craftsmanship and anomalous materiality elevates these items to objects of reexamination, reverence and inscrutability.

At seventy-four inches in height, Loop with Benzoin Incense (2017) presents a human-scaled twisting band made of fiberglass, epoxy resin and talc that discreetly bears a stick of incense within a lower coil. Wafting around the form, the fragrance reaches viewers before one is able to perceive the scope of the sculpture’s physical presence. The object becomes a kind of mystical or neo-pagan commentary on the phenomenological world and, as many of the works on view, explores the boundary between artificial and organic and the inversion of these two states.

Born 1967 in Whittier, CA, Evan Holloway received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1989 and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1997. He has been featured in numerous institutional exhibitions, including You’ve Got to Know the Rules … to Break Them, de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2015); Lightness of Being, Public Art Fund, City Hall Park, New York (2013); All of this and nothing, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); The Artist’s Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2010); Projects Series #35, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California (2008); 2008 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2008); Ensemble, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2007); The Uncertainty of Objects & Ideas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2006); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002). The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Media

• Sculpture

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