Christian Holstad
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Christian Holstad (born 1972, California) is an artist based in Brooklyn.
Holstad, who is openly gay, got his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994.
His work is included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Astrup Fearnley Museeet for Moderne Kunst in Oslo, Norway.
He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including “Greater New York 2005” at P.S. 1 [1] in New York, the 2004 Whitney Biennial [2] in New York, “Beautiful Lies You Could Live In” at Victoria Miro Gallery [3] in London, “Domestic Porn” at Foksal Foundation Gallery [4] in Warsaw and “The New Gothic” at Cokkie Snoei [5] in Rotterdam. He is represented by Aurel Scheibler [6] in Berlin, Daniel Reich [7] in New York and Galleria Massimo De Carlo [8] in Milan.
In an Artforum review of a 2006 solo exhibition, critic Christopher Bollen wrote that "Holstad's artistic career has often centered on the public spectacle and campy aestheticizing of sexual dissonance ... [In this show], Holstad seemed to ask whether s/m codes of thirty years ago have lost their deviant power. More provocatively, he asked what happened to the spiritual and physical liberation once accessed through these forms."[9]
Christian Holstad is most famous for his use of craft techniques and materials more commonly found around the house than in an art gallery; however, his practice ranges from sewing and knitting, painting and drawing, to video, performance and sculpture. Common to all his lines of inquiry is a desire to re-work and re-structure the context of any given topic or material so as to unsettle the viewer and create art which is not possible to read purely on first impressions. Taking the example of his ‘Eraserhead’ drawings – pictures excised from newspapers with ink erased in certain areas to create ambiguous images of public figures transformed into ghostly apparitions – Holstad’s intervention in his materials leads to works which are transformed from their original function into something which calls into question the trust we place in media imagery by revealing the subjective nature of the pictures. At the same time Holstad’s preference for the hand crafted is evident in all his work imbuing everything with an obvious air of time, effort and love. This care tempers the edge of Holstad’s social commentary and adds elements of issues such as domestic roles and gender, and the meeting of craft and high art.
