Andy Holden

Andy Holden is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, painting, music, performance, animation, curating, and multi-screen video. His practice often begins with personal experiences that expand into broader philosophical inquiry. As a teenager, he wrote the manifesto Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity, a concept that continues to shape his work. His breakout exhibition, Art Now: Andy Holden at Tate Britain (2010), featured Pyramid Piece, a large-scale knitted replica of a stone he took from the Great Pyramid as a child and later returned. Between 2011 and 2016, he created Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, an hour-long animated film in which the artist appeared as a cartoon character and explored the idea of reality as a cartoon. In Natural Selection (2017), made with his father, he examined birds’ nests to reflect on nature and nurture. Holden also curated Beano: Art of Breaking the Rules (2021) and performs regularly with his band Grubby Mitts.