TIM HOLMSTROM

About the Artist

Tim Holmstrom began his professional life as a photographer, journalist and adventure-race organizer, traveling across more than 30 countries and documenting extreme natural forces, remote cultures and high-stakes physical experiences.

Later in life he turned to painting and mixed media, allowing his past as a documentarian of nature, time and transformation to inform his artistic output. His works — oil on canvas, ink and oil on watercolor paper, charcoal dust, mixed media — evoke the fragile passage of time, the collapse and regeneration of matter, the tension between endurance and entropy.

Dealers have identified him as an artist “on the rise”, citing his unique background and the emotional weight of his canvases.

Holmstrom’s themes are vast yet intimate: nature’s chaos and calm, human aspiration and limitation, the ephemeral and the enduring. He uses subtle yet powerful contrasts—black and white, oil and dust, image and suggestion—to conjure contemplative spaces in which viewers meet their own impermanence and resilience.

Artistic Practice

In Holmstrom’s work you sense both the journey of a traveler and the stillness of a painter. He translates years of immersion in wild terrain, cultural rituals and photographic witnessing into canvases that pulse with memory and the unforeseeable. His process might begin with an image captured in the field, yet culminates in layers of oil, ink and charcoal dust applied to canvas or paper, evoking erosion, sedimentation, pause and movement. As he himself reflects, “We are always watching things form, dissolve … we must endure and navigate all this the best we can in the time we have.”

His works often hover between abstraction and landscape, between the literal and the metaphorical. A title like You Have to Sacrifice Something Else VI references a Zen koan and suggests the cost of seeing.

He shifts between large oil-on-canvas and more delicate paper works, always mindful of texture, light, and the interstice of presence and absence. In doing so, Holmstrom aligns materiality with meaning—each brushstroke, each smudge of dust, each subtle tonal shift becomes a trace of human encounter with the world’s forces.

Alignment with the iO Arts Center Mission

Tim Holmstrom’s practice embodies the ethos of the iO Arts Center. His art invites viewers not just to look, but to feeltime, to inhabit spaces of suspension, to meet the subtleties of transformation and presence. His blending of media, his attention to endurance and transience, his story of travel and awareness mirror iO’s commitment to multisensory awakening, disciplinary fusion, and conscious participation in art. By confronting the unseen tensions of human existence and natural epoch, his work furthers iO’s vision of art as a bridge between inner awareness and collective encounter.

Featured Exhibition at iO

“Event Horizon: Time & Tide”

Solo Exhibition

In “Event Horizon: Time & Tide”, Holmstrom presents a sweeping survey of new works that reflect on geological, atmospheric and human time-scales. Large-format canvases depict wave-forms, cosmic churn, sedimentary traces of memory; smaller mixed-media pieces integrate charcoal dust, photographic fragments and ink gestures, creating a layered archive of experience. The exhibition guides the viewer through thresholds of seeing: the hush before collapse, the drift of memory, the persistence of shape in flux.

Here at iO, the gallery space will be configured to allow moments of pause and reflection—comfortable benches, minimal interruptions, ambient light—so that each piece may invite stillness and interior resonance. Holmstrom’s work serves as invitation: to stand in the tide of time, to recognize one’s place, and to find quiet endurance in movement.

Artist Philosophy “When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.”– Tim Holmstrom

Holmstrom holds that art does not always ask for explanation but for attention. In his world, we do not only witness the landscape — we feel its weight, its decay, its possibility.