Christian Holstad - Artworks, Paintings and Exhibitions - the Saatchi Gallery

Holstad is interested in cognition, in particular the shifty relationships between touch, neurology, and sublimer states. Investigating these, he's developed a unique art practice, one that emphasizes its own meditative processes. If that sounds reductive, the work couldn't be less so--drawings, collages, sculptures, installations, costumes, performances, and videos that cleverly question our ability to fathom our own feelings.Christian Holstad's art expresses an acute sensitivity to the emotional underpinnings of everyday life. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, performances, collages, and installations distill the results of Holstad's consideration of a wide array of sources into poetic reflections on love and loss. Contemporary news stories and obituaries, Jean Genet's “The Maids,” library archives, interior design magazines, Hallmark greeting cards, and pornography have all been filtered into his artwork. Holstad often incorporates authentic, period-specific materials such as 1960s-era vinyl and fabrics or pages cut directly from magazines that evoke nostalgia for that age's kitsch culture. Craftwork, such as the crocheting used for his soft sculptures of vacuums, log fires, and cakes, is central to Holstad's process. He embraces labor-intensive techniques: each artwork must pass through not only his mind or heart but also his hands, and the resultant objects are imbued with an intimate aura of the personal and the domestic that comes from spending time with their maker.
Christian Holstad turns the original figures into ghostly membranes but leaves their heads, hands, and fingers untouched, grasping at empty air. Some figures seem to have melted together entirely, their eyes registering only stoic sorrow. It's a world in the terminal stages of some soul-eating malady. Yet the more we look, the less solid that take seems. A slight jog in perception, and what was horrific slips dreamily into that refuge from horror, the spiritual. The figures are now clearly in poses of assistance and compassion, their mouths serene. Holstad so deftly balances the pathos in these drawings with something considerably more beatific that we find ourselves in a kind of Rorschachian stutter. Holstad's interest in traditional forms of craftsmanship, invites us to reconsider culturally prescribed notions of gender, domesticity, and high and low art.