In Andy Holden’s show the question is asked as to how dead things can convey the life of an experience.

The World is Round and Mr Wrigley Makes Chewing Gum

Andy Holden

15 Jun 2008
24 Aug 2008

For the summer exhibition of Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, curator Mark Kremer has invited the English artist Andy Holden. Holdens show at the fortress borrows its title from an essay by Aldous Huxley. In “Art and the Obvious” the English author, discussing art and culture of the interbellum period, makes a case for an art that deeply engages with “obvious truths”, the facts/basics of earthly life.

One year ago Andy Holden visited the art fortress whereafter he submitted a proposal for a show that plays on the three different areas of the compound: the steel barracks across from the fortress island, the bunkers at the fortress island, and the outside environment.

Holden’s exhibition is comprised of works using various media, ranging from sculptures in different materials (wool, plaster, wood) and a musical piece to a video-film shot in Egypt. A key work in the show is a large sculpture made of iron, foam and wool, actually a blow-up of a piece of rock that the artist broke of the Cheops Pyramid at Giza as a boy.

A combination of greedyness and severity is characteristic of Andy Holden’s work and also shows itself in the way he refers to other artists. Robert Smithson is an influence but also Georg Baselitz and Henry Moore with their vigour of dialectical thought and striving for autonomous form. But this artist definitely has his own artistic course.

This particular show orbits around various concerns and thematics, specifically that of the monument and the monumental, the experience thereof and the attempt to transpose this to sculpture. The show puts forward the issue of how sculpture can be both a real object in space and an illusion.