Evan Holloway: Trees, Heads, Molds

Xavier Hufkens is pleased to announce a new exhibition by Evan Holloway. Trees, Heads, Molds is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

The sculptural work of Evan Holloway (°1967, California) is based on his investigation in the simple and fundamental transactions between people and objects. This also means that his sculptures are not just abstractions or decorations, but are to be understood as an engagement with contemporary society and its values.

Evan Holloway uses the vocabulary of modern sculpture for rigorous formal experimentation and he constantly plays on allusions and materials. His questioning of perception and representation is also explored through his love of craftsmanship, and through his comments on ‘style’ or ‘taste’. His work is characterised by the playful use of colour and the introduction of human figures, mostly in the form of heads, masks or little creatures, alongside mathematical, alphabetical and geometric systems.

In Trees, Heads, Molds, Evan Holloway shows three series of works. The artist has been working on his tree sculptures for over ten years. The earliest trees were wooden structures made from real branches. The artist assembled the branches into geometrical forms and painted the structures in bright colours, as if to transform natural organic elements into artificial artefacts. He has recently returned to this theme and will present his trees in bronze for the first time. Each of the trees shown at the gallery has a specific colour system applied to it, except for one large monochrome tree with a dark patina.

In the Head Stack series, a number of funny heads, depicting a male figure with a light bulb on his nose, are piled up into a totemic column. As the lights flash in a mathematically generated sequence, or all at once, different relationships are created between the heads in the ensemble. As these figures do not have a clear narrative, or any emotional intention, they are open to a wide range of different readings in terms of form, content and meaning. The works in the Head Stacks series vary in scale and one of the sculptures will be installed in the garden.

Evan Holloway’s plaster Mold sculptures have also been cast in bronze for the first time.  These works are negative molds created from three-dimensional objects, such as a plucked chicken, a hammer and nail or a Dan Flavin light fixture. The absence of these objects or, in other words, the original ‘positives’ from which the molds were made, is made tangible through the impressions left by their forms. Casting these works in bronze involves making a mold of the original plaster ‘mold’ sculpture, a fine art technique that Holloway uses in a contemporary way to raise questions about positive and negative forms, absence and presence, and replication.

Evan Holloway is one of LA’s most fascinating artists. He 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’. Holloway firmly believes that we still respond to a world of real physical objects, rather than to pure information, data and statistics.

Evan Holloway lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited mostly in America, but also in 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. His work is well represented in American Museums, including the Whitney in New York, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. 

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