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.