Exhibition: L'EGGO MY EGGO

Tom Holmes L'EGGO MY EGGO® February 12 - March 19 2017

Image of Tom Holmes painting hung in a room, the painting is a multi-panel work that is shaped like and resembles an Eggo waffle box. There are gestural and abstract markings on the painting and cut out stickers of the Power Puff Girls.
 

Time Out New York ArtReview

Bureau is pleased to announce Tom Holmes’s exhibition, L’Eggo My Eggo®, his third solo at Bureau. The exhibition collides two distinctly American vernacular iconographies of saccharine pop and austere minimalism and introduces the artist’s recent interest in automatic drawing. Two monumental paintings dominate the gallery walls, their expressive, sweeping and jagged gestures buzzing atop the smooth graphic of Eggo® waffle boxes. The day-glow eruption of color and frenetic movements are reflected in the cool, metallic surfaces of foiled rectangular brick grave plots and disquieting formations of chromed metal folding chairs.

Consumables geared towards the supple minds of children have engrossed Holmes for many years, compelled by the complexity of desire and dread they inspire. His first Trix® cereal box urn of 2010 introduced his incisive and heart-rending blend of funerary pop at his show Silly Rabbit: a gravestone and an urn at Dispatch. In these boxes full of promise and plenty Holmes recognizes a locus of control and fear: a mirage of candy-pop force fed to us en masse as the innocently complacent subjects of corporate ego and violence. Fear eats us as we children swallow the sugar coated fantasies of our first man-made substance-induced reveries. Holmes’s new paintings – two shown here of a suite of four – feature a vastly scaled-up and flattened waffle box announcing an explosive fantasy of infantile breakfast joy. The box’s graphic finish serves as ground for a flurry of abstract marks of expanded automatic drawing. Over the past two and a half years, working with a hypnotist, Holmes has sought to excavate the expressive potential of the subconscious mind through automatism, connecting a deep anxiety and fear of the inevitable with the pure communicative potential of the hand. The movement of the pen vigorously and subtly transcribes the non-verbal. In one composition comic heroines surf the sprawling lines and colorful passages ushering routes between mind and body; pop and expressionism.

If the paintings mine the abstract mind, Holmes’s sculpture delineates the limits of the physical body: bodies in formation, barricaded and at rest. In gleaming chrome and silver, these forms impose geometry on the body. For many years, Holmes has implemented the architecture of the funerary in his work. Gravestone, reliquary, urn and plot sculptures assert the power of that final, permanent application of architecture on the body. Here the rectilinear plot, composed of jaggy foiled bricks holds a poetic space of beauty and modesty. The reflective finishes of these new sculptures stresses that of surface and optical over the spatial and weighty, deepening the metaphysical nature of the show. Tom Holmes was born in Ozona, Texas, lives in Jackson Co. and works in Putnam and Cannon Co. Tennessee. Selected solo exhibitions include ‘Piss Yellow / Bars and Stars’, Bureau New York; ‘Temporary Monument’, Kunsthalle Bern; ‘Part of This Complete Breakfast: objects for a wake’, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels; ‘Painted Bones - some reliquaries’, Bureau New York; ‘Noisy Bottom’, Exile, Berlin. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Freymond-Guth Fine Arts Ltd, Zurich; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden and The Whitney Museum at Altria, New York. He has been awarded grants and residencies from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Joan Mitchell Foundation; Ox-Bow and The Edward F. Albee Foundation. His work is in the public collections of the Tang Museum of Skidmore College; Stiftung Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland and FRAC Bourgogne, France.

The artist wishes to extend special thanks to the following organizations: The Haven Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, CERF+, Artists’ Fellowship, Inc., Ox-Bow, and The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation.

In a gallery space, A large multi-part chain link fence is freestanding in front of a brick wall painted white. To the right side of the chain-link fence hans a framed drawing depicting a series of abstract marks in numerous colors on a tan ground. The frame is white.To the left of the fence is a planted fern.
Installation image of sculptures by Tom Holmes, one made from a series of metal folding chairs that have been chromed and are in a row facing a gallery wall. To the left is a chainlink fence about six feet tall that has a single framed drawing hanging from it.
Installation image of a framed drawing by Tom Holmes hanging on a chainlink fence, the drawing consists of many gestural multi-color paint marks on a wooden veneer.

Tom Holmes, untitled Arrangement, 2015, 11.4375 x 18.6875 inches

Installation image of a sculpture by Tom Holmes made from a series of metal folding chairs that have been chromed and are in a row facing a gallery wall.

Tom Holmes, untitled Seating Arrangement, 2016, 30.31 x 54 x 62 inches

Image of Tom Holmes painting hung in a room, the painting is a multi-panel work that is shaped like and resembles an Eggo waffle box. There are gestural and abstract markings on the painting. To the left of the painting are a stack of folding chairs that are covered in reflective foil leaning against the wall. In the foreground there is a grave plot demarcated by a series of bricks that are coated in aluminum foil.
Image of Tom Holmes painting hung in a room, the painting is a multi-panel work that is shaped like and resembles an Eggo waffle box. There are gestural and abstract markings on the painting. In the foreground there is a grave plot demarcated by a series of bricks that are coated in aluminum foil.
Image of Tom Holmes sculpture installed on the floor of a gallery which appears to be a grave plot demarcated by a series of bricks that are coated in aluminum foil.

Tom Holmes, untitled Plot, 2017, 84.5 x 34.5 x 8.5 inches

Image of Tom Holmes painting hung in a room, the painting is a multi-panel work that is shaped like and resembles an Eggo waffle box. There are gestural and abstract markings on the painting and cut out stickers of the Power Puff Girls. To the right of the painting are a stack of folding chairs that are covered in reflective foil leaning against the wall. In the foreground there is a grave plot demarcated by a series of bricks that are coated in aluminum foil.
Image of Tom Holmes painting hung in a room, the painting is a multi-panel work that is shaped like and resembles an Eggo waffle box. There are gestural and abstract markings on the painting.

Tom Holmes, untitled Arrangement, 2014-2017, 93.75 x 174.5 inches

Image of Tom Holmes painting hung in a room, the painting is a multi-panel work that is shaped like and resembles an Eggo waffle box. There are gestural and abstract markings on the painting and cut out stickers of the Power Puff Girls. To the right of the painting are a stack of folding chairs that are covered in reflective foil leaning against the wall.
Frontal mage of Tom Holmes made from a stack of folding chairs that are covered in reflective foil leaning against the wall.
Side looking image of Tom Holmes made from a stack of folding chairs that are covered in reflective foil leaning against the wall.

Tom Holmes, untitled Seating Arrangement, 2017, 38 x 17.5 x 15 inches