Brian Hollister: Notations

Edward Cella Art & Architecture is pleased to present Notations, a series of recent works on paper by Los Angeles based artist Brian Hollister. Hollister’s work reflects a sustained sensitivity to the subtle atmospheric shifts in nature. The artist captures his observations through a formal vocabulary he has cultivated with consistency to resolve and maturity over the years. Powerfully reductive, the artist’s paintings distil environmental atmosphere and landscape to its most essential and elemental components: color and horizon. Brian Hollister’s work reverberates with luminous gradations and subtle reciprocities of color; their dynamic quality emerges from the push and pull of the interstice and the transition. Saturated with light, these paintings effectively inform the minimal tenets of abstraction with the warmth of organic depth and space.

Brian Hollister gleans his inspiration from direct observation and immersion in his subject. His frequent pilgrimages through the backcountry of California and the greater Southwest, as well as his extensive international travels, inform works that speak to a cultivated experience of space, light, and color. The paintings invoke the atmospheric palettes of those geographies, and the evasive grandeur of their great natural phenomena. They are concise abstractions derived from the excesses of experiential awe. Through the most elemental of all compositional properties, color and line, and in the absence of anything extraneous, the work tenders an intimate impression of the natural world while remaining immaterial and formally meditative.

Brian Hollister earned his MFA from UCLA, and studied under teachers such as Richard Diebenkorn, Charles Garabedian, and Lee Mullican. Hollister maintains an active studio in Los Angeles and has regularly exhibited with Carl Berg and Ruth Bachofner galleries.