Yngve Holen’s sculpture dissects the technologies reshaping contemporary life. While his work is characterised by his use of machines, systems and industrial spare parts used for, around, and by the human condition – in transportation, communications, waste, medicine, manufacturing or industrial food production – the body itself is almost always evoked only in its absence. Material remnants of frenzied aspirational living: the desire to live longer, to travel further and faster, or to enhance intelligence, are all folded into Holen’s works. The resulting objects short-circuit and contradict themselves to highlight the fraught subjectivities and troubled moral landscapes of today. Spanning classical to state-of-the-art industrial processes, Holen’s works complicate the conceptual functioning of the technologies at stake, reframing them as ornamental, or – despite their futuristic constitutions – delivered with a flat, unnerving humour, as future relics of a bygone era.
Yngve Holen was born in 1982 in Braunschweig, Germany, and lives and works between Oslo and Berlin. He studied architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and sculpture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Neu, Berlin (2023); Spazio Maiocchi, Milan (2022); X Museum, Beijing (2021); Modern Art, London (2019); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2019); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2018); Converso, Milan (2018); and Kunsthalle Basel (2016). He has participated in recent group exhibitions at Modern Art, London (2024); Bundekunsthalle, Bonn (2022); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2020); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2020); Kistefos, Oslo (2019); and mumok, Vienna (2018); among other venues. Holen has been the recipient of prizes including the Overbeck Prize (2020); the Robert Jacobsen Prize (2017); and ars viva (2014/15). His sculptures are held in collections including Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; The National Museum of Art, Oslo; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Sammlung Boros, Berlin.
