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Ex-Baldessarre remains closed

Weight of Imagination

Published by HENI

Text by Jennifer Higge, with a Foreword by Jarvis Cocker

Andy Holden is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist whose wide-ranging practice embraces sculpture, installation, painting, video, performance, animation, music and curating. His work often starts from personal anecdotes or idiosyncratic narratives, and expands into broader philosophical and cultural inquiry. This monograph focuses on the twelve projects that have defined his career to date. These include breakout works Pyramid Piece and Return of the Pyramid Piece (2008); acclaimed magnum opus, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (2011–17); the extensively touring Artangel commission Natural Selection (2017); his powerfully moving meditation on love, loss, grief and mourning, Song of Songs (2023); and his 2025 commission for Frieze Sculpture, London. Created in close collaboration with the artist, and featuring a thoughtful and engaging text by influential art writer Jennifer Higgie, this book offers the opportunity to reflect on and celebrate Holden’s inimitable art career so far.

Book Details

Publication: September 2026

Illustrations: 250

Dimensions: 260 x 200 mm

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 978-1-911736-40-0

No. of pages: 144

Negative Capabilities (Dawn Chorus)

Seventeen gallery, London

Andy Holden & Peter Holden
13th November – 19th December 2026
PV Thursday 12th November 6pm

Negative Capabilities is an exhibition by Andy Holden centred on a film made in collaboration with his father, the ornithologist Peter Holden. Developed over fifteen years and adapted from a series of live performances first presented at Tate Britain in 2011, the central film of the exhibition, Lecture on Birdsong (2011–2026), follows six walks undertaken within a one-mile radius of the Holdens’ home, from the end of winter through spring. The film explores the persistent human desire to understand and translate birdsong while acknowledging the limits of that endeavour.

Drawing on tradition of nature writing the film unfolds as a dialogue between father and son while tracing and questioning the process of learning. Peter Holden, one of Britain’s most respected ornithologists and educators, teaches Andy to identify birds through sound rather than sight, revisiting knowledge that Andy never fully absorbed as a child. As they move through hedgerows, churchyards, riverbanks and farmland, discussions of territory, ecology, mimicry and evolution unfold alongside Romantic poetry, classical music and the history of ornithology. The work moves from a subjective response to birdsong towards increasingly sophisticated methods of scientific analysis, only to encounter the same impasse: birdsong can be studied, described and reproduced, but never fully translated.

The exhibition also presents a series of screen-prints documenting each public iteration of Lecture on Birdsong. Produced over the course of the project, the prints function as records of performances that have gradually evolved into the film. Together they chart the development of the work across fifteen years, from lecture-performance to cinematic form.

Alongside the film and prints, Holden presents Auguries (Dawn Chorus), a group of sculptural works derived from the wave forms of the songs of the birds discussed in the film. Produced as turned wooden forms and displayed on reclaimed railway-sleeper plinths, the sculptures translate acoustic information into physical objects. Neither illustration nor scientific model, the sculptures occupy a space between notation, ornament and artefact. Resembling modernist toys, devotional objects or mechanical components, they give material presence to sounds that are fleeting and many of which are rapidly disappearing.

Lecture on Birdsong provides a framework for considering how our understanding of the world is shaped by both inheritance and experience, while showing how learning is inseparable from the environments in which it takes place. The exhibition considers what remains beyond interpretation and what might be gained by paying closer attention to the non-human voices that surround us and can be understood as an extension to Natural Selection, Andy and Peter Holden’s major collaborative project commissioned by Artangel in 2017. Presented at eight museums across the United Kingdom and subsequently restaged at Tate St Ives and the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Natural Selection established an expansive dialogue between contemporary art, ornithology and family history. Works from that project are now held in the collections of Tate, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery and numerous private collections.

We would like to thank Museum Voorlinden for their general loan of artworks for this exhibition.

DOOR DE BOMEN HET BOS

Kröller-Müller Museum, NL.

23rd March until 15th September 2024

Showing ‘Pyramid Piece’ and ‘Natural Selection’

the work ‘The Auguries’ is permanently installed in the museum’s sculpture garden

TATE ST IVES - 10 Feb - 6th May 2024

Free - with Gallery Admission

A Natural History of Nest Building 2017 is a three-screen video installation which draws on the traditions of natural history television programmes. The thirty-minute film is narrated by Andy Holden and his father, ornithologist Peter Holden. It is divided into three chapters, Nest Type, Nest Site and Material, concluding with a post-script on the bowerbird, the only known bird to make a structure for display only.

Throughout the film, Holden and his father adopt different positions on the significance of birds’ nests. His father considers them from a scientific perspective, reflecting on inherited traits and learned behaviours. Holden examines them as sculptural objects, suggesting comparisons between nest building and making art. The scripted exchange combines ironic humour with profound conversations on the nature of creativity and the parental bond.

The work began as a series of performative lectures given by Holden and his father at museums, festivals and universities across the UK. Posters designed for these events are shown alongside the video work in this one room display, alongside childhood photographs of Holden taken by his father and original or re-made specimens from his collection of nests.

‘CUTE’ Somerset House

25 Jan - 14 Apr 2024

£18.50/Concessions from £11

Pre-booking recommended to avoid disappointment

A major new exhibition exploring the irresistible force of cuteness in contemporary culture.

Includes an installation by Andy Holden, as well as works by: Mark Leckey, Sean-Kierre Lyons, AYA TAKANO, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Nayland Blake, Cosima von Bonin, Hannah Diamond, Ed Fornieles, Juliana Huxtable, Rachel Maclean, Julien Ceccaldi, Paige K. B., Isaac Lythgoe, Alake Shilling, Wong Ping, Liv Preston, CFGNY, Ram Han, Maggie Lee, Bunny Rogers, and Flannery Silva.

What I was for What I am Becoming

CHARLES MOFFETT

431 Washington Street New York, NY 10013
437 Washington Street, Second Floor, New York, NY 10013

Jan 12-Feb 24th 2024

DETAILS

SONG OF SONGS

Solo exhibition by Andy Holden

SEVENTEEN

14th Sept - 23rd October 2023

Wednesday - Saturday 11-6pm

270-276 Kingsland Road, London E8 4DG

t. +44(0) 207 249 7789 info@seventeengallery.com

The Auguries (Last Calls)

Permanent Sculpture for Wakefield

Commissioned by Wakefield Council

Located outside of Wakefield One

Full of Days: Hermione Burton and Andy Holden

The Gallery of Everything, 19th March - 30th April 2023

With original score by Saint Etienne

4 Chiltern Street, London W1 Tuesday - Sunday 11-6pm

INFO

Opening 2-6pm Sunday 19th

Events:

Jennifer Higgie exhibition talk w/Andy Holden: 13th April 6pm BOOK A FREE TICKET

Andy Holden, Opposite of Time: Selected Short Films: Saturday 22nd April, 7pm (running time 1hr20)

‘FULL of DAYS’ EXHIBITION TOURS TO:

CAST

Helston, Cornwall

18th July - 30th August 2023

FORTHCOMING SCREENINGS: NN NORTHAMPTON DATE TBC

British Art Show 9 - Plymouth

Exhibiting Cat-tharsis (2016/2021), 300 ceramic cats and 18min video, at the Box, Plymouth

Collected Free Labour: Blog Interviews 2010-2021

BUY BOOK

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Collected Free Labour: Blog Interviews 2010-2021 contains selected extracts from interviews with the artist undertaken between 2010 - 2021. Previously existing online, central fragments of these have been rearranged thematically and intercut with a new conversation between the artist and the book’s editor, Tyler Woolcott. Speaking in 2021 on his ongoing self-reflective practice, Holden states that: “It’s urgent and perhaps more acceptable to be sincere as a regular mode of being.” This is especially evident within “the climate of intense sincerity dominated by identity politics, moral certainty and climate uncertainty.” Collected Free Labour: Blog Interviews 2010-2021 is published to coincide with British Art Show 9, an exhibition that includes Holden’s work and travels from Aberdeen to Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth during 2021 and 2022.

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Published by Slimvolume

Edited by Tyler Woolcott

Essay by Andrew Hunt

Designed by Calamity James

Hardback, 128 pages, 77 colour illustrations, 7 b+w illustrations, 244mm x 172mm ISBN: 978-1-910516-17-1

Collected Domestic Conceptualism, 2021

Beano: Art of Breaking the Rules

Curated by Andy Holden

21 Oct 2021 - 06 Mar 2022

£16 / £12.50 concessions

Under 6s free

★★★★★ “From Viz to the fourth plinth to David Bowie, the perennially upstart comic’s influence rampages on… it is a riot in there”

The Guardian

"Stupid rules! If I had my way there’d only be one – that there are no rules!"

Minnie the Minx

Do you remember your mum and dad dragging you round boring old museums? Bleugh! Well, prepare for your favourite Beano characters to shake things up as we celebrate their spirit of rebellion with our major new exhibition this autumn.

Step into the pages of the comic and take a trip into Beanotown to explore how this beloved icon of British comics has fired up successive generations to break the rules, while discovering artists who push boundaries in their own original and wonderful ways.

Come face-to-face with the Beano gang - including Dennis and Gnasher, Minnie the Minx, Bananaman and the Bash Street Kids – through original comic artwork and amazing artefacts, plundered from the Beano’s archive.

The exhibition is curated by artist and lifelong Beano fan Andy Holden, who gathers today’s greatest creative rule-breakers, including writers, musicians, painters, sculptors and photographers. Each creative revels in their own spirit of rebellion and contributors include Sarah Lucas, Hardeep Pandhal, Phyllida Barlow, pop star Chris Sievey (otherwise known by his alter-ego Frank Sidebottom), Martin Creed, Alex Chinneck, Heather Phillipson,  Ryan Gander, Jann Haworth, Emma Hart, editorial cartoonist Martin Rowson, Rene Matić, Bedwyr Williams and many more. New works include a recording featuring young fiction writer Alex Wheatle, a comic strip from artist Nicola Lane and a neon sculpture from Simeon Barclay.

So whether you want to be inspired by fearless artistic mavericks, revisit a much-loved childhood comic masterpiece or explore the Beano’s larger-than-life characters with your own little rebels, this exhibition will prove that there really is no age limit on the art of breaking the rules.