ANDY HOLDEN: Weight of Imagination

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.Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer and occasional curator who lives in London. She was a central figure in the editorial team at frieze magazine from 1998 until 2021 and has authored three recent books: The Mirror and the Palette: Revolution, Rebellion and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (2021); The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World (2023); and the novel Bedlam (2026).She was editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: The Artist’s Joke (2007), and has written numerous articles, essays and reviews, and hosted two podcasts: Bow Down and NGA’s Artists’s Artists.Jarvis Cocker is an English musician. As the founder, frontman, lyricist and only consistent member of the band Pulp he became a reluctant figurehead of the Britpop genre of the mid-1990s.

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