Andrew Holmquist

Andrew Holmquist draws from popular culture and everyday life for his lush paintings and works on paper, which slip between representation and abstraction and stand as celebrations of painting itself. He revels in the challenges and possibilities of his medium: “My paintings take advantage of the viscosity of oil paint and play with the mercurial nature of a representational image essentially made out of colorful mud.” Working primarily with oil, in combination with a range of traditional and unconventional materials (he incorporated a pizza crust into one of his canvases), Holmquist fills his compositions with fat, gestural brushstrokes, geometric forms, drips, splatters, human figures, and passages of color. In his work, figuration dissolves into abstraction, and abstraction coalesces into recognizable imagery, a play on what he calls the “slippery” nature of paint, at once infinitely malleable and full of limitations.