Andy Holden

b. 1982, United Kingdom

Andy Holden’s work comprises large installations, sculpture, painting, pop music, performance, animation, curating and multi-screen-videos. His work is often defined by very personal starting points, used to arrive at more abstract philosophical questions.
 
His first major exhibition was Art Now: Andy Holden at Tate Britain (2010), in which he exhibited Pyramid Piece, an enormous knitted rock based on a piece of pyramid that he stole from the Great Pyramid of Giza as a boy and later returned. Solo exhibitions of his work have included Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time (2011) at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Cookham Erratics at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2012). Holden’s exhibition at Cubitt, London (2011) took the form of a library which explored the notion of Thingly Time. As a teenager Holden wrote a manifesto for art titled Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity, and this was revisited as a video installation at the Zabludowicz Collection (2013), Spike Island (2014) and Kunsthalle Winterthur (2015).
 
Between 2011 and 2017, Holden worked on Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, a hour-long animated film which explored the idea that the world was now best understood as a cartoon, and examined how physics works in an animated universe. The film was first shown at Glasgow International (2016) and Venice Biennale (2017).
 
Natural Selection (2017), commissioned by Artangel, was made in collaboration with his father Peter Holden, and utilised a detailed exploration of bird nests and egg collecting to explore questions of mankind’s changing relation to the natural word, as well as the father-son relationship. The exhibition toured to a number of museums including Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, Towner Art Gallery and Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.

Holden curated Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules at Somerset House in 2021 and has previously curated World as Cartoon at Tate Britain (2017) and Be Glad for the Song has No End at Wysing Arts Centre (2010). In 2021 a book of interviews with Holden was published by Slimvolume under the title Collected Free Labour. His work is in the permanent collections of Tate, Arts Council Collection, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery and numerous public and private collections in Europe. His work was recently included in British Art Show 9.

CV