Fran Holstrom

An evolving choice of materials such as art magazines, temporary tattoos, stickers, tape and bits of clothing are snipped and collaged paint off the brush. Recognizable images freely co-mingle with abstract gesture to disrupt our ‘universal’ approach to abstract painting. Working from series to series in a search for the ever shifting truth in abstraction, her inventive compositions occupy an uncertain ground between the state of being built and eroding. The artist earned an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn after studying interdisciplinary visual arts at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work has been exhibited in New York City and around the country. Inspired by her childhood spent on a farm in Wisconsin as well as the urban decay of her current surroundings in New York City, the artist apes the crudity of common everyday life and forces bits of popular culture to contend head-on with the raw language of paint.