Yngve Holen is of Norwegian-German heritage and lives in Berlin.
The work by the sculptor Yngve Holen revolves around the increasingly tangled relationship between human and machine, the physical body and consumer culture.
The human body, it is often said, is conspicuously absent in the work of the Norwegian German artist Yngve Holen. Yet everywhere in his oeuvre, the implications of the body, its subjectivity, messy corporeality, and imbrications in a culture of consumption, are evoked.
Disemboweled washing machines, bisected water coolers, MRI-scanned and 3D-printed smashed cell phones: Holen has used them all in previous works. His predilection for things that are at one remove from the humans who make, buy, or use them is shaped by an interest in the technologies that define our everyday surroundings, from transportation and plastic surgery to industrial food production and security systems. He studied at Städelschule in Frankfurt from which he graduated in 2010.
His work has been shown in numerous institutional solo and group shows around the world like in 2016, a monographic exhibition VERTICALSEAT that was dedicated to his work at the Kunsthalle Basel and in 2018 he exhibited at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf other notable exhibitions: X Museum, Beijing; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Galerie Neu, Berlin, Modern Art, London and Spazio Maiocchi, Milano in 2022
He was awarded the 2014/15 ars viva prize and the 2017 Robert Jacobsen Prize.