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ANDY HOLDEN: Weight of Imagination
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.
Publication:
September 2026
Illustrations:
250
Dimensions:
260 x 200 mm
Format:
Hardback
ISBN:
978-1-911736-40-0
No. of pages:
144
Andy Holden (b. 1982, Bedford, UK) wrote a manifesto for art titled, ‘Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity’ as a teenager, and rose to attention with Art Now: Andy Holden exhibition at Tate Britain, London, in 2010. Since then he has exhibited internationally, including at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK; Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; Charles Moffett, New York and Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands. He received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2012, was included in the Future Generation Art Prize (2017) and British Art Show 9 (2022) and in 2017 was commissioned by Google Arts and Culture for the BBC. His work is held in British public collections including Tate, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery and Arts Council Collection, as well as collections across Europe. He has upcoming solo shows in 2027 and 2028 in major public institutions (to be announced).
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.
Foreword by Jarvis Cocker, founder and frontman of British band Pulp.