Andy Holden’s work comprises of 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 much of his subsequent work, and was the subject of a major exhibition at Zabludowicz Collection and Spike Island in 2013/4. 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 due to increasing guilt, later returned. From 2011-2016 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. First shown at Glasgow International before touring to museums worldwide including 2017 Venice Biennale, the artist appeared in the film as a cartoon version of himself, interacting with a vast archive of clips from animation history to create a theory that the world was now best understood as a cartoon. The film was the subject of a solo exhibition at Perimeter, London in 2024.
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. The video A Natural History of Nest Building was acquired by Tate and the exhibition was restaged in 2024 at Tate St Ives and in Holland at Kröller-Müller Museum.
His recent work, Full of Days 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. The film uses game engine software to reconstruct the unknown artists paintings and to narrate her own story. In 2024 Holden also had his solo exhibition in New York at Charles Moffett Gallery, showing a mixture of animated videos, paintings and sculptures.
In 2021 he curated Beano: Art of Breaking the Rules at Somerset House. Collected Free Labour, a book of interviews with Holden, was published 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, Kröller-Müller Museum (NL) and well as a number of public and private collections in Europe and America. In September 2023 his first permanent public sculpture, The Auguries, was unveiled in Wakefield, U.K.
Holden’s has released several records with his art-pop band Grubby Mitts, performing at numerous galleries, concert venues and festivals (including Whitechapel Gallery, Milton Keyes Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Tate, Wysing, Donau Festival, Austria and Latitude Festival U.K.). A new album, Love in the Misanthropocene, will be released on September 26th with a headline concert at the ICA London on September 27th to coincide with his exhibition at Palmer Gallery.
Holden’s work can concurrently be seen as part of Frieze Sculpture in Regents Park (presented by Seventeen and Hidde van Seggelen), and at La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, France.