Andy Holden’s work comprises: large installations, sculpture, painting, 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. As a teenager Holden wrote a manifesto for art titled, “Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity”,  which can be seen to inform all his subsequent work. For his first major exhibition ‘Art Now: Andy Holden’ at TATE Britain (2010), he exhibited Pyramid Piece, a vastly enlarged replica of a piece of stone he stole from the Great Pyramid at Giza as a boy, and later returned. From 2011-2017 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. The sequel, Structure of Feeling, was presented at Block 336 in 2021 and the exhibition, taking the form of a ghost train ride, could only be navigated by motorised carts. Holden’s Natural Selection, commissioned by Artangel in 2017, was made in collaboration with his father Peter Holden and utilised a detailed exploration of birds nests and eggs to explore questions of nature and nurture, and mankind’s changing relation to the natural word. His work for British Art Show 9 (2022) and exhibited in full at The Gallery of Everything (2023), was an animated film about an unknown ‘outsider’ artist, Hermione, who’s work he discovered in a charity shop, and explored notions of time, sickness, and legacy. 

Holden has released a number of records with The Grubby Mitts. In 2021 he curated Beano: Art of Breaking the Rules at Somerset House. Collected Free Labour, a book of interviews with Holden was published last year by Slimvolume. His work can be found in the permanent public collections of Tate, Arts Council Collection, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery, as well as a number of museums in Europe. In September 2023 his first permanent public sculpture, The Auguries, was unveiled in Wakefield. In 2024 A Natural History of Nest Building will be exhibited at Tate St Ives, and Pyramid Piece and Natural Selection will be shown at Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands. 

In 2021 Holden curated Beano: Art of Breaking the Rules at Somerset House. The exhibition told an alternative history of British art in relation to the worlds longest running children’s comic and included Gilbert and George, Sarah Lucas, Martin Creed, Bansky, Richard Wentworth, Phyllida Barlow, Claes Oldenburg, Jann Haworth, Nick Park, Ed Atkins, Heather Phillipson, Rene Matic and archive comic material set inside a scaled up version of ‘Beanotown’. Holden appeared as a character in the Beano in October 2021. Previously Holden curated World as Cartoon at Tate Britain (2017) and Be Glad for the Song has No End (2010) at Wysing Art Centre and the first retrospective of influential comedian Simon Munnery.

His work can be found in the permanent public collections of Tate, Arts Council Collection, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery, Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands as well a number of other museums and private collections in Europe and America. In September 2023 his first permanent public sculpture, The Auguries, was unveiled in Wakefield.

 

Bio

Andy Holden CV

 

Seventeen Exhibitions

Song of Songs
Frieze Sculpture 2025

 

Selected Press

Frieze 
The Guardian
The Strange Case of the Artist Discovered in a Charity Shop, Colin Gleadell, Telegraph, April 4th 2023 
Full of Days, The Wonderfully Strange…, Adrian Searl, Guardian, April 2023
When Outsider Art Entered the Mainstream, Hettie Judah, Appolo, 6th July 2023
Raw Vision, review of Full of Days, Nuala Ernest, Summer 2023
Andy Holden Interviewed by Jarvis Cocker, Observer, April 2022
How Our Critic Ended up in the Beano, (5* Review), Guardian, by Adrian Searle, Oct 2021
Heartfelt, Meticulous, and Splendidly Irreverent, Financial Times, Arwa Halder, 2nd Nov 2021
How the Beano Encouraged Generations of Artist’s to Break the Rules, Arts Newspaper, Oct 2021
>Natural Selection, review, Himali Singh Soin, Art Forum, Jan 2018
Frieze, Laws of Motion, feature, Darian Leader, July 2017
Observer, 5* Review of Natural Selection, Laura Cummings, Oct 2017
Guardian, Natural Selction Review, Sky Sherwin, Oct 2017
Andy Holden’s Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity, Notes on Metamodernism, Elinor Morgan, Sept 2014
Rising stars of 2014 – art, Sky Sherwin, The Observer, Jan 2014
Robert Clark and Skye Sherwin, The best exhibitions of 2014: The Guardian
Interview: Frieze Magazine, June 2012.
Stephanie Bailey, Towards a Manifesto of Irony, Sincerity, and Nostalgia (Interview): Hyperallergic, Nov 2013 
Modern Painters, Childish Things: Andy Holden’s Sincere Irony
Mousse Magazine, Andy Holden at Zabludowicz Collection
20 inspirational artist selected by Frieze cover artists, 2010
Interview, Crack Magazine, Feb 2013
I Object, Art Monthly, September 2013
Frieze, review, David Trigg, March 2012
Sound: Be Glad For The Song Has No End, review, Art Monthly, November 2010
Chewy Cosmos, Thingly Time, review by David Ryan, Art Monthly, Sept 2011
Andy Holden Press

Andy Holden, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, 2011-16
Two-channel colour video installation, synchronised, with sound.
57 minutes

Installation view at The Perimeter, London, 2024

Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape is the result of five years work and contains a full realised animated theory proposing the world is best now understood as a cartoon.  The film examines the formation of ‘laws’ within  cartoons as a way of making sense of the world we are now within. The film is made from hundreds cartoons clips and adopts a part-lecture, part-documentary, part-conspiracy theory tone, with the artist rendered as an animation in order to narrate his theory. Laws such as “Everything falls faster than an anvil” are mixed with Greek myths, philosophy, politics, physics and the history of animation to create an hour long exploration of the world as an irrational space where anything can happen, yet certain things reoccur, and a new set of Laws have formed.  

Andy Holden, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, 2011-16
Two-channel colour video installation, synchronised, with sound.
57 minutes

Installation view at Glasgow International, 2016

For details see www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-sculpture

Holden’s sculptures, Auguries (Lament), evoke the songs of birds once common to Britain but that have declined dramatically over the past 50 years, with many species disappearing by as much as 50%. The sculpture evokes a portion of a earlier dawn chorus, songs sung under the cover of dark, coming to an end as the daylight arrives. The sculptures, made from recordings of the birds songs, turned first into wave forms, then reworked digitally in 3D software by Holden, and finally cast in metal, are characterised by their fragmented, skeletal forms, suggestive of both natural structures such as branches and the remnants of something lost. This aesthetic speaks to the “interplay between clarity and obscurity,” revealing a form that is simultaneously present and suggestive of absence. The bird is represented by its song, with the sculptures as a “melancholy time capsules” of a sound that is disappearing, the wave form turned upwards to extend towards the sky. Once cast in bronze they have echoes of religious or magical totems.

Installation view of Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time at Kettles Yard, 2011

Andy Holden, Infinite Resignation (Unus instar omnium), 2023
Collage on archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, framed
152.6 x 102.9 cm

Installation view of Natural Selection, an Artangel project at Newington Library, 2017

Installation view of Natural Selection, an Artangel project at Newington Library, 2017

Installation view of Natural Selection, an Artangel project at Newington Library, London 2017

Andy Holden, Pyramid Piece and Return of the Pyramid Piece, 2010
Knitted yarns,foam, steel
300 x 400 x 500 cm
Installation view at Tate Britain

Andy Holden, Library for the Unfinished Concept of Thingly Time, 2011-2023
Furniture, books, carpets, bronze, plaster, ceramic, shellac, wood, stop motion animation, HD videos, resin, various prints, laminated chipboard, furnishings and archival material

Installation view of Song of Songs at Seventeen, London, 2023

Installation view of Song of Songs at Seventeen, London, 2023

Andy Holden, Library for the Unfinished Concept of Thingly Time, 2011-2023
Furniture, books, carpets, bronze, plaster, ceramic, shellac, wood, stop motion animation, HD videos, resin, various prints, laminated chipboard, furnishings and archival material

Andy Holden, Library for the Unfinished Concept of Thingly Time, 2011-2023
Furniture, books, carpets, bronze, plaster, ceramic, shellac, wood, stop motion animation, HD videos, resin, various prints, laminated chipboard, furnishings and archival material