Christian Holstad
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Christian Holstad (born 1972, California) is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York City. He received his BFA qualification at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994.
His work is included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, 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.
Holstad, who is openly gay, has shown work internationally in many exhibitions, including "Greater New York 2005" at P.S. 1 in New York, the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York, "Beautiful Lies You Could Live In" at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, "Domestic Porn" at the Foksal Foundation Gallery in Warsaw and "The New Gothic" at Cokkie Snoei in Rotterdam. He is represented by Daniel Reich in New York and Galleria Massimo De Carlo 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."[1]
Holstad is well known for his use of craft techniques and materials more commonly found around the house than in an art gallery. His media include sewing, knitting, painting, drawing, video, performance and sculpture. Much of his work expresses a desire to re-work and re-structure the context of a topic or material, so as to unsettle the viewer and create art which is difficult to read purely on first impressions. For example, his "Eraserhead" drawings – pictures excised from newspapers with ink erased in certain areas to transform images of public figures into ghostly apparitions – transforms images from their original function and calls into question our trust in media imagery by revealing the pictures' subjective nature.
