Andrew Holmquist
Andrew Holmquist, was born in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1985 and now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
He explores the unsettled nature of contemporary identity as seen through the lens of the free-wheeling present. Drawing on myriad cultural references, from the density and scale found in history painting to the singular and tender moments found in intimate-scale forms such as the miniature, Holmquist’s works manifest as realisations of embodied landscapes; hyperreal scenes of imagination and personal memory. These expressions unfurl in imaginative bursts of colour made visible in paintings that span the gamut from the abstract to the figurative; from the innately detailed to the performatively gestural.
Born into a creative family, the artist began making art at a young age, producing an extensive body of work from ceramics and sculpture, drawing and printmaking, through to his signature paintings, which vary in material and texture. At the heart of these multitudinous vistas is an exploratory sensibility around the future of queer spaces.
In the age of Instagram frames and distributed desire, Holmquist seeks to ask: what do the multiple layered spaces of otherness look like? In Holmquist’s multi-dimensional spaces, one is witness to amorphous bodies, deconstructed into cellular forms; contoured limbs that appear and disappear; figures which at first seem stable become formally unspooled, suggestive of an interiority — a body beyond the realm of the human, a metaphor for a hyperlinked, accelerating, technological age. At times ebullient, at others laden with melancholy, Holmquist’s adventures in art speak to a wanting, longing, searching sense of a collective self.
Raised in Northfield, Minnesota, he moved to Chicago in 2003 to attend The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received his BFA (2008) and MFA (2014) and was awarded the Merit Scholarship, the Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship, and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship for young and promising artists in the Chicago region.
Following his studies at SAIC, he relocated to Berlin, where he lived until moving to L.A. in early 2019. His work was included in the 2015 edition of the biannual juried exhibition “Ground Floor” at the Hyde Park Art Center, which serves as a survey of the best work created by MFA degree recipients in the Chicago area, and in 2016, he was invited to participate in the Vancouver Arts Festival, where his work was featured in the exhibition “Drama Queer”, examining the queer perspective in contemporary art. In 2017, his paintings were included in the exhibition “Eternal Youth” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
