Quotations about Holden and her work:

“Her images are truly breathtaking. In her work, Holden integrates performance art, painting and drawing, lyrics, photography and video, and the digital manipulation of these combinations of art forms.”

Ellen-K Syverstad of Ellen-K Fine Art Photography, 2009 in her review of the AIPAD New York Photography Show.

“Holden billboards pixellation of her edges and other digital artifacts, which contrast sharply with the layers of paint she’s applied, in her succession of layered rephotographing to achieve her final result. Thus, she celebrates the artificiality of the digital medium as the new techno-brushstroke. It seems an obvious development, but it took creative courage to bring it off, given the prevailing Photoshop ideology of concealing the process and imitating analogue film, if not ‘reality’.”

Joel Simpson, Artshub, 2008

“European artist Lisa Holden’s work has been compared to that of such innovative and influential artists as Cindy Sherman, Pipilotti Rist and Tracey Moffat. But Holden’s imagery stands apart with her interest in themes of identity and gender combined with fantasy and art historical precedents, as well as for her unique process that merges photography with painting and sometimes installation and performance art. The aesthetic effect of her process, which involves digital imagery and manipulation, hand-painted imagery, and re-photography, is perhaps initially the most recognizable hallmark of her work. The brilliantly artificial tonality and the pixelated imperfections in the final work coalesce with the unmistakably feminine and feminist subject matter to create art that is visually and conceptually complex, yet also instantly appealing and recognizable, thanks to references to Western culture as well as elements of contemporary design and consumerism.”

N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Focus, 2007

“Despite the ultramodern mix of media, Holden’s works are deeply rooted in art history. She layers content just like she layers colours, playing with codes and cliches from our collective memory. In recent years, she has found her interest in dramatic stagings and female bodies anticipated in 19th-century paintings…This fascination is reflected in her choice of subjects, but also in the elongated formats of some of her works, which resemble those of Edward Burne-Jones or Gustav Klimt. Another parallel is the atmosphere of sensuous lassitude that pervades many of Holden’s works but never comes without a highly contemporary sense of isolation and fragmentation. Her Bathsheba might be a traditional female nude in a landscape, but her face is hidden behind a field of black colour, and the landscape is fragmented and flattened.”

Anneke Bokern, Eyemazing, 2007

“(Holden’s) references have changed from Central Europe to nineteenth-century British art, particularly that of the Pre-Raphaelites, which is so well represented today in the collections of the northern cities where the artist grew up. Likewise in the two panels of Untitled (Reveil) the very use of the diptych already conjures up the formal idiom of the Pre-Raphaelites, which show a female nude on the left, emerging from a wooded scene, her head concealed by what looks like packaging, while on the right the Romantic rock formation and dripping fountain complete the picture. She does not pass unobserved, though, in this natural setting: in the left-hand panel she is observed by a tethered goat and a vague human figure (the goatherd?) behind it, and the right-hand panel also contains a human observer, silhouetted against the tree trunk on the left. Goats, whether depicted in the act of copulating or not, traditionally connote lechery. If we add it all up– the goat, the fountain, the naked female, the voyeurs, we are presented with an erotic narrative, but a narrative that is not told …We construct it, like a work of bricolage, by making use of certain elements contained in the work. But it remains a tale untold.”

Peter Mason, essay accompanying one-person exhibition, La Sala Reservada, 2005