Andy Holden

Stanley Picker Fellow Fine Art

2011

Andy Holden’s work incorporates a wide variety of media and forms of presentation, from plaster, bronze and ceramic objects, to music, performance and large outdoor sculpture.

Recent exhibitions include Pyramid Piece and Return of the Pyramid Piece for Art Now at Tate Britain and Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. He curated Be Glad For the Song Has No End – A Festival of Artists’ Music at Wysing Arts Centre in 2010.

For his Stanley Picker Fellowship Holden’s work will focus on a key moment in his development as an artist – his involvement with the art movement known as MI!MS (Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity), which took place in his home town of Bedford in the first few years on the 21st Century.

The movement posited a coupling of Irony and Sincerity, the extreme points of the two poles operating together simultaneously. As it’s manifesto stated: “MI!MS is about the willingness to be lied to and the will to believe!

It’s about the intense sadness of our unrealistic dreams, and the intense joy of our desire for them. We should not be cynical about the emotions in our work – we are simply cynical about the means we have to express those emotions…”

A recent documentary, commissioned by the Royal College of Art MA Curating students for Resonance 104.4FM, gives a good introduction into the intentions and activities of MI!MS through a series of reflections by many of the original members.

MI!MS: A Radio Play by LostToysRecords