Nick Holdsworth | Noughties Playboy

Nick Holdsworth — Noughties Playboy

Nick Holdsworth began his career in 1998 with the launch of Purple Om/Random, a cult fashion label carried by Harvey Nichols, Harrods, Liberty’s, Colette in Paris, and Barney’s in Tokyo, building his visual language from the 1990s obsession with psychedelic imagery and youth culture before applying that same sensibility to fine art. Collaborations with Levi’s Red Japan, Griffin Studio UK, and Harvey Nichols followed before Holdsworth began exploring ways to channel his background in graphic design and fashion into canvas-based work.

His distinctive technique begins with a source image, which is then rebuilt pixel by pixel through a meticulous placement process — each of the hundreds of individual points of colour carefully controlled to reconstruct the whole. The result sits somewhere between photography and pointillism: the image is immediately legible from a distance yet reveals its underlying digital architecture on closer inspection, the surface texture of each pixel lending the work a quality closer to woven fabric or mosaic than to conventional print. Noughties Playboy applies that process to the visual grammar of early-2000s glamour culture — the Playboy bunny costume, the bold eye makeup, the studied defiance of the pose — rendered in Holdsworth’s characteristic grid until the image becomes as much about the process of looking as the subject being looked at.

Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.

Mixed media, pixelation process on canvas
71 × 95 cm (artwork); 79 × 104 cm (framed)
Artist’s Proof Signed
Note: a standard edition of 95 also exists; this artist’s proof is a separate, rarer variant