Bio

For over 20 years, the British artist Dan Holdsworth has been blending art, science and nature to produce works which challenge our perceptions and reinvent the notion of landscape.

Holdsworth was born in 1974 in Welwyn Garden City, England. He studied photography at the London College of Printing (1998), and has exhibited internationally including solo shows at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Barbican Art Gallery, London; and group shows at Tate Britain, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. 

His work is held in private collections - including;

Tate Gallery (London, UK), Pompidou Centre Collection (Paris, France), Museum of Modern Art Vienna Collection (Vienna, Austria), Victoria & Albert Museum Collection (London, UK), The Government Art Collection (London, UK), National Maritime Museum Collection (London, UK), DZ Bank Collection (Frankfurt, Germany), Worchester City Art Gallery (UK), The Saatchi Collection (London, UK), UBS Art Collection (Zurich, Switzerland), Museums Sheffield Collection (Sheffield, UK), Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art Collection (Sunderland, UK), Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art Collection (UK), University of the Arts Collection (London, UK), Hackney Museum (London, UK), British Airways Art Collection (UK).

The Northern Canon Collection (UK), The Goetz Collection (Munich, Germany), The Arts Council Collection (UK), The Laing Art Gallery Collection (UK), The Progressive Art Collection (USA), Southampton City Art Gallery Collection (UK), Denver Art Museum Collection (USA), Rolls-Royce Art Collection (UK /Germany).

Synopsis

Dan Holdsworth’s Acceleration Structures allows us to see Europe’s most sublime landscapes in radically new ways. He reveals the structures of three Alpine glaciers that artists have attempted to capture for centuries, namely Argentière, Bossons, and Bionnassay. Acceleration Structure allows us to follow the exact contours of every single peak and crevice in a way that no artist could ever have achieved.

Holdsworth has travelled across the entire planet to investigate and photograph many of the world’s most remote, sublime landscapes. For the majority of his career he has been accustomed to working with large plate cameras which, when in inhospitable places - and under adverse conditions, present demanding technical as much as artistic challenges. These challenges, and the artist’s imaginative transformation of the world, have resulted in images unlike those made by any of his peers.  

Acceleration Structures continues his project to reveal unseen parts of the world, through an innovative form of 'cameraless photography’ called ‘photogrammetry.  These three dimensional wireframe models are created through a combination of intense fieldwork where the artist documents every square foot of a particular area, and through a pioneering use of high end software in his studio that correlates the measurements of each patch of land between them.  From these measurements, the artist creates a model of the site in virtual space.

Acceleration Structures positions Holdsworth in a tradition of artists who have made creative use of the most advanced technologies of their time to advance our knowledge of the world. Holdsworth notes this tradition of invention is a peculiarly English one -  as photography was effectively invented in England, by William Henry Fox Talbot, in 1839.