IZZY LEE
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Andrew Holmquist
Interpenetrate

ON VIEW
APRIL 4 - MAY 4, 2025
Presented under the gallery's former name, North Loop West.

North Loop West presents Interpenetrate: an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew Holmquist. This is the gallery’s inaugural show in LA after operating in Williamstown, Mass., from 2022 to 2024.

The presentation features new ceramic sculptures alongside paintings and works on paper including the artist’s towering LA Intersection, shown for the first time. In Holmquist’s hands, a major intersection in LA’s Atwater Village is abstracted into a swirling mass of movement and simultaneity: stoplights, cacti, streetlamps, and the whirring of cars and bright light are united on the stage of a concrete curb. Rendered through trace monotype, densely pigmented wax pastels and oil paint, LA Intersection underlines the artist’s ever-evolving use of abstraction to conjure multisensory experiences of the city. 

Holmquist paints and draws Los Angeles from direct observation: the portraits of palm trees on view were painted entirely outside in Elysian Park. Riffing on art historical traditions like en plein air painting, the artist takes advantage of LA’s almost-always sunny skies and envelopes his subjects in the intense light characteristic of the city. Individual trees are no longer standalone symbols of LA, but rather idiosyncratic figures inseparable from the active environments in which they were painted in. In a new body of work, Holmquist takes up the figure of the male bather, a subject deeply entrenched in Western art history. Painted in his signature sweeping, sensuous brushstrokes, the lines between the figures and bodies of water are fluid—the bathers slip in and out of recognizability, caught between real and imagined.
Running throughout the artist’s inextricably linked sculptural, painting, and drawing practices is a distinct feeling of fluidity and movement. Boundaries are unfixed and porous in Holmquist’s world: across mediums, between figure and ground, the simultaneous recognition of both the material reality of paint and what is depicted, and most recently, in his interest in light for its ability to fill and move through forms. As Holmquist simultaneously works across two- and three-dimensions, he presents the potential for abstraction to blur lines between viewer and work, inviting viewers to find themselves mirrored within.

Andrew Holmquist (b. 1985, Northfield, MN) received his BFA (2008) and MFA (2014) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo presentations include Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City; Galerie Lefebvre & Fils, Paris; Five Car Garage, Los Angeles; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago; and Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York. His work has been shown in Eternal Youth at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Drama Queer at the Vancouver Arts Festival, and Ground Floor at the Hyde Park Art Center. It is held in the Rachofsky Collection at The Warehouse, Dallas; the Illinois State Museum; the University of Chicago; and the JPMorgan Chase, Fidelity, and Progressive art collections, among others. He is featured in Omar Kholeif's Internet/Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (Phaidon).


ARTIST PAGE

Andrew Holmquist


Installation view, Touching Grass, IZZY LEE, Los Angeles, CA. November 21 – January 3, 2025. 
Images courtesy Josh Schaedel.