Tom Burtonwood
A Cube is a Rectangle (106), 2023
Holly Holmes
The Bottle is for Drinking, 2024
Color, in the work of Holly Holmes and Tom Burtonwood, is structure — the thing that separates one plane from another, that defines where a form begins and the space around it ends.
This exhibition brings together two artists who share an understanding that color does as much work as line, edge, or material.
Burtonwood's drawings and sculptures are built on systems — geometric progressions, folding and unfolding cubes — but it is color that makes those systems legible.
A shift in hue marks the rotation of a plane; a saturated edge holds a form against the white of the paper, or the space of a room. His palette is not expressive in the conventional sense. It is analytical.
Photography by Nathan Keay
For Burtonwood, color is information, the notation of a dimension that drawing alone cannot fully render. With his sculptures, paint does similar work: distinguishing surfaces that touch, activating the space between planes, making visible the difference between an inside and an outside.
Holly Holmes in her studio
Holly Holmes moves constantly between scales — from the microscopic structures of cells and organisms, to the broad patterns of architectural space and built environments.
Her tufted wool works hold both points of view at once, collapsing the distance between what a microscope reveals and what the eye takes in standing in a room.
For Holmes, color is what makes that movement between scales possible and coherent.
Holly Holmes
Odds are Pretty Good, 2025
The particular purply rose of a cell wall and the saturation of a sunlit room might be separated by orders of magnitude, but in Holmes' work, they rhyme.
Color becomes the connective tissue between the very small and the very large, and a way of exploring how the same logic of color as form operates at every level of looking.
Together, their practices treat color as an instrument that defines planes, marks transitions, and reveals structures. This exhibition is an invitation to look at how two artists have made that instrument their own, each in ways that are distinct and yet cohesive.
Tom Burtonwood
Double Dutch White Cube, 2025
Artist statement
Tom burtonwood
MFA Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (US) 2001
BA Loughborough College of Art (UK) 1997
Currently Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Contemporary Practices, Painting and Drawing, and Art Technology/Sound Practices
Tom Burtonwood's art is rooted in systems, in the logic of rules, repetition, and the generative possibilities that emerge when constraints are applied consistently over time.
Exploring color as form across drawing, sculpture, and animation, he produces works that are simultaneously governed by a set of instructions, and open to interpretation.
At the center of Burtonwood’s current work is an investigation of the way a form can offer multiple readings at once, shifting between states depending on how it is observed.
His ongoing project, A Cube is a Rectangle, takes a simple motif derived from an isometric cube as its starting point.
Through processes of accumulation — hundreds of small, brightly-colored drawings arranged in grids, color-saturated geometric sculptures that unfold and reassemble, and stop-frame animations that show the cube's transformation — Burtonwood explores how repetition and variation of form can reveal complexity rather than reduce it.
He is drawn to the fold as both a physical and philosophical operation. His sculptures and drawings accumulate layers of meaning, each iteration adding depth without resolution.
This necessary incompleteness keeps the work alive to interpretation, just as the isometric cube refuses to settle no matter how long, or how closely, you look.
For Burtonwood, color, pattern, and movement are not decorative choices, but structural ones: they mirror how cognition itself works, always assembling the world from incomplete and shifting information.
Artist statement
holly holmes
MFA The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US) 2011
BFA Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (US) 2000
Currently Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Adjunct Faculty at Columbia College, Chicago.
Holy Holmes’ art explores the interplay between abstraction and representation, focusing on how facts, interpretations, and personal translations of experiences shape her work.
She explores color as form through both acrylic painting and the creation of colorful tufted-wool wall pieces, both of which are inspired by careful microscopic observation of nature.
They are characterized by recurring themes, similar forms, and intricate patterns of texture and color, creating a visual rhythm that resonates across her body of work.
Holmes’ method is a pendulum that swings between two polar opposites. On the one hand, she works in the emotional landscape — drawing, annotating, and making images of her surroundings and how she feels in that space, at that time. The images this practice produces are abstract yet suffused with her emotional experience, offering multiple layers of color, shape, and texture.
At the other pole, is a study of the intricate beauty of the hidden natural world around her. Holmes explores the natural world directly, by delving into the earth with tweezers and sterile jars, to unearth treasures visible only through a microscope.
This balanced oscillation between an imaginative macro and an interpretative micro, allows her to both explore her emotional experiences, and satisfy her intellectual curiosity.
Holmes aims to evoke a sense of wonderment in viewers, drawing inspiration from both the exquisite “color as form” of the natural world, and our profound, but often unobserved, interactions with the built environment.
Holly Holmes
There is Wisdom in Waiting (fragment), 2024
About Gallery Andreas
Founded by artist and educator Mark Andreas in 2025, Gallery Andreas is dedicated to celebrating nature, community, and the creative experience.
The Gallery developed organically from his Stamford, CT art center Studio Andreas, which offers expert instruction in woodworking, textile and ceramic arts. Studio Andreas provides a space to experience firsthand the wonder of nature through the practice of art and craft.
Gallery Andreas expands upon that mission by featuring curated art exhibitions, classes, and unique events that explore the many ways nature, community and creativity interconnect. It serves as both a hub for the Studio Andreas community, and a window to the wider world.