Four creators share their Dall-E-generated images – and their hopes and fears about AI in art

by Anna Furman

‘We are seeing a reflection of ourselves’ – Rachel Rossin

Pioneering Digital Artist Sarah Meyohas Gets Gallery Representation

BY SHANTI ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI

Meyohas first began incorporating blockchain technology into her artistic practice in 2015, when she debuted a project called BitchCoin. The cryptocurrency was a conceptual project that played on the idea of investing directly in artists instead of in particular works of art. The token is now considered a proto-NFT, and it took on new relevance in 2021 with the start of the NFT boom.

Meyohas will also be a speaker at Art Basel for the “The New Patrons: NFT Collectors and Supporters” conversation on June 16.

June Exhibitions at No.9 Cork Street

Opening on 2 June until 18 June 2022, Frieze's Mayfair gallery presents exhibitions by Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi), Hymodernity (Digital Platform) and Athr Gallery (Jeddah)

IN FRIEZE | 23 MAY 22

Canon! looks to disrupt the established biases of art, redefining our conceptions of what art might be in the burgeoning age of digital art and accelerated technological development. The group exhibition presents works which explore the possibilities of an ‘evolutionary now’. The artists selected for Canon! were chosen by Hymodernity to reflect the digital art platform’s diverse community, as a celebration of the breadth of artistic creativity and identities. Artists include Petra Cortright, 4FSB, Masha Batsii, Samuel Lubicz and WRLD.SPACE, amongst others. 

You’re Invited: Rhizome’s 2022 Benefit Honoring Rachel Rossin & Julie Martin

Tuesday, May 31 at Bowery Terrace, in partnership with Zora

By Rhizome

May 05, 2022

For #EarthDay, “Hellscape No 17” by artist @petra_cortright has been installed at the Cantor Arts Center (@cantorarts) and the @hammer_museum as part of #ACoolMillionCampaign, a public arts initiative for climate awareness led by artists and institutions to expand environmental justice programming and support the conservation of one million acres of land.

COUNTY

Booth B43

With works by Sarah Meyohas

While most booths at this year’s Untitled Art Miami Beach feature a selection of works by multiple artists, COUNTY has opted for a solo presentation of renowned conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas. Back in 2015, the French American artist made headlines with her cryptocurrency performance “Bitchcoin,” which was minted months before Etherium came into existence. In 2017, she was included in Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” list. At COUNTY’s booth, Meyohas’s works continue the artist’s reflections on the nature and the possibilities of emerging technologies in contemporary society.

In addition to mesmerizing new hologram pieces by the artist, most of the works featured in the presentation are part of Mehoya’s enthralling “Speculation” series, including Liquid Speculation 5 and Blue and White Speculation (both 2021). “Even though she’s at the forefront in new mediums, her ‘Speculation’ works are created using a very traditional method: a hidden camera and two-way mirrors,” explained gallerist Dalton Freed. Close to half of the available works, priced between $20,000 and $30,000, had sold by the end of the day.

Now, at a time of ecological crisis and hyperconnectivity, these skyscapes also become markers of environmental anxiety.

“Coming out of the pandemic when outdoor experiences and nature have taken on a new meaning and gravity in our lives, this exhibition represents a fresh way for people to engage with art and nature simultaneously,” the curator Tal Michael Haring, who worked on the show with Hadas Maor, said in a statement.

El Anatsui, Pamela Rosenkranz, Timur Si-Qin, Sigalit Landau and Sarah Meyohas are among the other artists who will contribute to the coming show at locations in the United States, Britain, South Africa, Australia, Israel and Canada.

By Bourree Lam

May 22, 2021 5:30 am ET

Sarah Meyohas’s work at the intersection of art, technology and finance earned the contemporary artist fame with financiers and tech geeks. Her latest piece aims squarely at the crypto crowd.

Long before Beeple’s digital collage fetched tens of millions of dollars at auction, Ms. Meyohas was experimenting with using the blockchain technology behind bitcoin to make art. The result looked a lot like the so-called nonfungible tokens that have powered millions in art sales in recent months, along with NBA Top Shot and other digital collectibles. NFTs are similar to bitcoin: Each one is unique, allowing them to act like deeds proving ownership of digital assets.

Gallery Talk with Enoc Perez and Christina Mossaides Strassfield: Saturday, May 22 at 3pm

Moran & Spiga Gallery 
Curator: Christina Strassfield 

Enoc Perez is a  contemporary  Puerto Rican born multimedia  artist best known for his paintings and oil stick drawings. Perez’s Guild Hall exhibition, Paradise, will explore the theme of natural disasters. 

By Jori Finkel

Published March 12, 2021

Clottey’s humble choice of material speaks to the droughts and water supply issues that threaten Southern California as well as his native Ghana. He cuts plastic pieces from so-called Kufuor gallons, colorful containers used in Ghana for storing water, and stitches them together with wire.

By William S. Smith

Published in issue: Jan/Feb 2021

The concept of layers is essential to understanding Petra Cortright's work. The intricate digital paintings she has created over the past decade take advantage of the powerful "layer" function at the heart of Photoshop. Every digital mark and brushstroke she makes using the image-editing software can be isolated and manipulated in its own slice of virtual space before being flattened and printed on canvas. But what if, instead of flattening these layers, they could be expanded in three dimensions? 

Ten photographs marking the 10th anniversary of access to water and sanitation being declared a human right by the UN have been commissioned from 10 visual artists by the charity WaterAid to show the impact of clean water on people’s lives.

Globally, 785 million people – one in 10 – still lack access to water close to home and 2 billion people – one in four – don’t have a toilet of their own.

Tomorrow’s World by Serge Attukwei Clottey (Ghana)

“I wanted to create art that would represent the anguish and violence that go along with our planet’s problems. People do not realise how their own suffering is tied to the environment: to their long trip to fetch water, or their discomfort under the heat when the streets have no trees. Ghana is facing some of the most detrimental consequences from climate change and water shortages. Yet the government does nothing, so I have taken it upon myself to educate through art.”

VVEBCAM received lots of search hits, and some people expressed their anger at its misleading descriptors in the comments section below it. Cortright, in turn, robustly answered her critics in the spirit of the Internet burn. Her spammy keywords led to the video’s eventual pulling from YouTube in 2010.

Cortright’s video and the swirling interactivity around it made VVEBCAM one of the first social media artworks, and it remains one of the most influential. It engaged with a highly volatile, anonymous digital populace, one that has become a dominant force in today’s socio-political landscape.

November 1, 2019 - January 5, 2020

Opening Reception at GANA ART CENTER Friday November 1st at 5PM

Gana Art is pleased to present ≪Reflections≫, representing the contemporary art scene with 34 artists, in collaboration with filmmaker and curator, Matt Black, this exhibition is centered around his film titled “Reflections.” Following the film’s theme, Gana Art has curated this exhibition to feature works by worldly renowned artists not only from the international realm, but also from Korea, highlighting the whole art scene.

After a three-year hiatus from the runway, threeASFOUR, recently made a triumphant return during New York Fashion Week with a show at The Guggenheim Museum. Debuting their collaborative collection with artist, Stanley Casselman, LIGHTBEINGS, is an exploration of the fusion of art and fashion.

 This exhibition will present a new body of work comprising six paintings that refer to the Lipstick Building (1986), an elliptical office tower in Manhattan designed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. In each work, Perez uses his characteristic style to explore the formal qualities of the Lipstick Building in a variety of palettes.

Ry David Bradley “Overworld” at COMA Gallery, Rushcutters Bay

An Overworld is an area within a video game that interconnects all its levels or locations. Typically it presents an aerial perspective, a global map of the stages that have been completed or are yet to be, allowing one to see what may lay ahead without revealing what that is. Access is granted by completing tasks, or entering secret passwords. In presenting an exhibition installation that mirrors the aerial stage, where some positions have been unlocked, and others are yet to be known—Ry David Bradley continues an exploration of access and restriction within specific worlds, each an enquiry for where painting was, may now be and is yet to be.

Where his previous works focused on exteriors, The Cinematic Self furthers his tradition of imagining beautiful spaces usually filled with people rendered completely empty. “I made these beautiful paintings of these modernist buildings,” Perez told Interview. “A lot of those buildings today are in ruins. They’re abandoned. That was the utopia I was painting 25 years ago.”

Christies - Los Angeles

An exhibition of works by Kour Pour in dialogue with 19th century Japanese woodblock prints, curated by Shiva Balaghi, and presented by Stefan Simchowitz

Petra Cortright (Born 1986, Santa Barbara, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY (2008) and the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). 

The late Hamburg-based painter Norbert Fleischer’s Think in Pictures—a moody image of a man’s face overlaid with swirling text—is the curatorial inspiration behind a new exhibition in New York’s Lower East Side of the same name organized by dealer Tara Amelchenko, painter John Newsom, artist André Butzer, and Matt Dillon, best-known as as actor, but who is also a practicing artist.

Putting personal dramas behind him, the artist opens his first New York show in five years (at a new gallery).

By Ted Loos

April 25, 2019

Mr. Bleckner, 69, made his name in the 80s and 90s by channeling the anger and sorrow of the AIDS crisis into somber, abstract paintings. Since then, he has been painting steadily, lately from his base in the Hamptons.

He hasn’t had a show in New York in five years, but on April 24 he debuts a suite of more than a dozen canvases at Petzel Gallery in the show “Pharmaceutria” (“sorceress” in Latin). It furthers Mr. Bleckner’s exploration of modes of perception.

Some artists paint portraits. New York–based artist Enoc Perez has made modernist architecture his subject. Painting in a slashing overlay style that seems to channel both Andy Warhol and Franz Kline, in Liberty & Restraint, an exhibition that opened last month at the Dallas Contemporary and eight locations throughout the city, he investigates the gallery of local buildings designed by architect Philip Johnson. MODERN’s associate editor Sammy Dalati caught up with Perez at his cavernous studio in Astoria Queens, and asked him about his process and his inspiration for the show.

GROUP EXHIBITION INCLUDING: DONALD BAECHLER, ROSS BLECKNER, ANDRÉ BUTZER, PETRA CORTRIGHT, MARC HANDELMAN, JOHN NEWSOM, RACHEL ROSSIN, JULIAN SCHNABEL AND BRIAN WILLMONT

By Robin Pogrebin for The New York Times

Ms. Watts has covered the wall space of the TriBeCa home — much of it with work from fund-raising auctions for the New York Academy of Art, where she is a board member. Ms. Watts said she looks forward to those galas as opportunities to discover new artists and raise money for scholarships.

At those auctions — where she has been known to get into bidding wars — Ms. Watts has acquired work by Will Cotton, Donald Sultan, Hugo Guinness and Liz Markus, among others.

HERNING MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
SEP 29 2018 - MAR 3 2019
CHIEF CURATOR MICHAEL BANK-CHRISTOFFERSEN

New York-based artist Sarah Meyohas invites us into an intriguing world of infinite tunnels in her installation series titled Speculations. Her thrilling body of work involves two mirrors facing each other, the empty space between them filled with a smattering of objects — rose petals, tree branches, a row of daisies, and even something as ephemeral as smoke — which produces intricate visuals that seemingly duplicate, recede and disappear into a void.

At 31, Cortright is young for a survey (“Too young,” she told Vice in February), but she’s long been recognized as a pioneer in the field of what’s often called post-internet art, meaning work that deals, tangentially or directly, with the web. Her paintings—meticulously layered Photoshop files that incorporate images she finds online (roses, kitchens, beach scenes) with digital drawings (flowers, squiggles) printed on aluminum, silk, or flags—prompted the website Artsy to declare Cortright “the Monet of the 21st Century.” 

ART IN THE PARK ZÜRICH | Baur au Lac Park, Talstrasse 1, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland

This year’s Art in the Park artist, Donald Baechler, was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1956. He attended the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore (1974-77) and Cooper Union, New York (1977-78).

A painter reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler, Cortright dilutes her original digital medium to create images that almost seem to glow, that create a space of their own. Printed on linen, aluminum and paper, the labor of Cortright’s research process is hidden by the lightness and deftness of her mark-making.

Brintz Gallery is honored to present The Color of Light, a two-person exhibition featuring recent paintings by Ross Bleckner and Eric Freeman. 

In vivid washes of color; in overlaid stencil-like images; and in bronze sculptures of massed, crumpled-up forms, artist Enoc Perez uses a multimedia approach reminiscent of Warhol and Rauschenberg to both celebrate and satirize some of the 20th century’s best-known buildings. In Dallas this month, he’s turned his sights on controversial modern designer Philip Johnson: In a show sponsored by local art museum Dallas Contemporary, Perez has created works featuring Johnson’s buildings, and then installed some of them inside the buildings themselves (of which Dallas has no fewer than six). The artist took a break from the museum opening to talk about the intrigues and the afterlife of America’s most infamous architectural gadfly.

Brintz Gallery is pleased to present Shangri-La, an exhibition of recent oil paintings of flora and fauna by renowned New York artist John Newsom. Newsom's works are included in The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Hammer Museum, among other important public and private collections.

Noah Becker spoke with the great Donald Baechler on the eve of his new solo show opening Thursday November 2, 2018 from 6–8 pm in New York City at Cheim and Read.

This Artist Is Wearing His Mother’s Clothing to Promote Social Change in Ghana

BY CHIOMA NNADI

Ghanaian Independence Day falls on March 6 and last year artist Serge Attukwei Clottey marked the occasion with a boundary-pushing act of self-liberation. He walked through the streets of Accra, the nation’s capital, in his deceased mother’s clothes with members of his art collective—also in their mothers’ clothing—marching by his side in solidarity. Wearing vibrantly printed traditional dress, the mostly male crew drew hundreds of onlookers out of their homes and onto the street, sending shockwaves through Ghanaian society where the conversation around gender fluidity is only just beginning to open up and homosexuality is illegal.

Sarah Meyohas is a visual artist working across media. For her project Cloud of Petals, she staged a performance at the site of the former Bell Labs. Sixteen workers photographed 100,000 individual rose petals, compiling a massive dataset. This information was used to map out an artificial intelligence algorithm that learned to generate new, unique petals forever.

The performance resulted in a film, six gaze-based virtual reality experiences, and a series of sculptures, presented during a large-scale solo exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York. The Cloud of Petals exhibition becomes a site for contemplation about a post-human reality and the future of labor in the face of automation. The film has been screened at various festivals, including the Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival, Slamdance, NY Times Talks, CogX, and the Locarno Film Festival.

Don’t be fooled by the title of Sarah Meyohas’s current exhibition, “Cloud of Petals,” which seems to suggest a stereotypically girly flower display. On the contrary, the artist approaches roses from a no-nonsense, analytical perspective, informed by her clear-eyed take on the commercial aspect of the floral business—a far cry from the romance and femininity typically associated with such fragrant blooms.

“Yes, roses are a super symbol of love and beauty, but they are also a big business product,” Meyohas told artnet News during a visit to Red Bull Arts New York, where she was hard at work installing the show, which opened to the public October 12.

The exhibition is the outgrowth of a project that began last year at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, once a site of major scientific and technological innovation as the headquarters of the telephone and information giant. When Meyohas first set foot inside the historic, Eero Saarinen-designed space—then empty ahead of its conversion into Bell Works, a new multi-purpose development—the 26-year-old artist had no idea what she was getting herself into.

Cloud of Petals, the 26-year-old artist’s latest project, is as ethereal and delightfully obscure as it sounds. Meyohas marries nature and technology to discover the meaning in collecting (and collected) data; it’s fitting that the undertaking was conducted at Bell Labs, a now-abandoned research complex that birthed the information theory, which used math to define and represent information, allowing for its transmission, storage—and resulting, eventually, in the creation of the Internet. Opening at Red Bull Arts New York on October 12, Meyohas’s show is fourfold: it features a film, vitrines made by wall panels from Bell Labs fitted with two-way mirrors, six virtual reality simulations depicting digitized and pixelated rose petals, and two wall displays of 3,200 individually pressed and preserved petals.

Two of his pieces, which were taken from footage on climate change, will be shown in Im/material: Painting in the Digital Age, an exhibition at the Sophia Contemporary Gallery in London’s Mayfair. Ry Bradley’s work attempts to capture augmented reality in a physical form using a Japanese-made polyester mesh that is so tightly woven it’s almost invisible. “This is the closest I’ve got to finding a true analogue for augmented reality,” he says. “I wanted it to feel ethereal, super lightweight – like it’s there but not truly. I’m trying to pre-empt this AR layer that I know is coming."

Renowned artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) guest-curates a lyrical meditation on blue and black. Inspired by the Pulitzer’s monumental Ellsworth Kelly wall sculpture, Blue Black, Ligon will expand Kelly’s exploration of the two colors with a diverse selection of more than forty works spanning almost a century and touching upon notions of language, identity, and memory. 

Brintz Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of ‘GARDEN PARTY,’ curated by gallery artist John Newsom. The exhibition focuses on the theme of pastoral nature, highlighting motifs of flora and fauna found within the work of five distinguished New York based painters including Joe Andoe, Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, John Newsom and Enoc Perez. 

Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s presents a focused look at painting from this decade with works drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition includes work by artists often identified with this explosive period—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel—as well as by several lesser-known painters. 

Serge Attukwei Clottey walked through Ghana’s capital city in his dead mother’s clothes to honour her memory – and to highlight injustice against women. It is the latest step in his art collective’s mission to create social change

Sarah Meyohas, an artist we interviewed back in January, has had her New York Stock Exchange account closed by Charles Schwab. She has exhibited her paintings which reflect her stock market trades and their effects on the market at Gallery 303. In an article by Fortune, it is said that her ambitions with this project is to “alter prices of 12 different NYSE-traded stocks,” proving her exhibition a relative success. With a market cap of $40 million or less, the effects of Meyohas’ stock buys are strong enough to be evident enough to catch the attention of Charles Schwab.

Sarah Meyohas had her account closed by Charles Schwab, perhaps making the exact point she wanted to

Technology Expands the World for African Artists

By Ginanne Brownell Mitic

March 24, 2016

The Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey said that thanks to the Internet, where he posts his artistic productions on his Instagram account, he not only was offered — and took — the chance to study in Brazil but he also was contacted by one of his future collectors, who is based in California.

“I think technology helps African artists to reach many people in the global art space,” he said by email. “For example, I’ve been getting many residency opportunities from all over the world because people always see my work online.”

We think we know what stock performance means. Then Sarah Meyohas comes along.

Meyohas, a Wharton graduate who also holds an MFA from Yale, took that term as the title of her first solo art show, at the 303 gallery in New York City. For two weeks in January, Meyohas traded stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. Then, in real time, she drew the changes in each stock’s valuation with oil stick on blank canvases mounted throughout the space.

Artist Sarah Meyohas is a market mover—literally.

In her first solo show, “Stock Performance,” which opened Jan. 8 at New York City’s 303 Gallery, Meyohas will attempt to turn the ups and downs of the stock market into art. Starting Tuesday and continuing until Jan. 20, she will try to alter the prices of 12 different NYSE-traded stocks, painting those price movements on canvas as she trades—live—at the gallery.

Around this time last year, the art press picked up a quirky new story: a Yale photography M.F.A. named Sarah Meyohas had created her own cryptocurrency called Bitchcoin, with an exchange rate set at one Bitchcoin to 25 square inches of a Meyohas print. (As the value of her work changes over time, so too will the value of the coins.) In an art world that was grappling, often dismissively, with the shift toward art-as-investment, Meyohas’s take on the Bitcoin addressed the world of finance with unusual directness and a cooperative stance. It seemed to offer collectors a tool for using Meyohas's artworks as investments. 

Freeman’s new works on view at Launch F18 continue the artist’s approach to abstract illusion, where a play of light within the painting’s surface seems to create movement within the stillness of pure color. —Hannah Gregory

Artist Sarah Meyohas launched her own personal cryptocurrency on Sunday night in the Financial District at Trinity Place, a bar located across from the birthplace of the Occupy movement, Zuccotti Park. Called BitchCoin, perhaps a feminist play on the name of the most famous cryptocurrency of them all, the currency is the subject of an exhibition on prediction at Where, a think tank and exhibition space based out of a shipping container in Brooklyn.

Architectural Digest chats with Kour Pour as he prepares for the debut of his first solo show in Los Angeles.

By 
Michael Slenske

Rather than shy away from the drama of the art market, Pour is jumping right into the fire with his Los Angeles solo debut, “Samsara,” at West Hollywood’s Depart Foundation. Whereas the screen prints of his early works were entirely painted over by hand, the six paintings in this new show leave some traces of the screens, drawing parallels between hand-knotted carpets with artisan dyes and factory-made rugs with artificial colors.

Known for his paintings of modernist buildings, artist Enoc Perez is pushing his work in bold new directions

By 
Stephen Wallis
November 1, 2013

Perez’s signature works—large, seductive paintings of modernist buildings, from hotels in his native Puerto Rico to icons such as New York’s Lever House and Chicago’s Marina City towers—are owned by major museums and influential collectors like Peter Brant and Aby Rosen. The earliest examples were made via a meticulous process of transferring oil-stick drawings to canvas, sometimes dozens of layers of them, by hand. 

An Oklahoman now based in New York, Andoe works with pared-down, deceptively biddable images: boxy 1960s automobiles, beer cans, two-lane blacktops and lickerish young women. His technique of applying paint and then wiping it away blurs the contours of his figures. Glimpsed quickly, the soft monochrome lines of his canvases suggest cosy snapshots from the late 1960s or early 1970s. But Andoe sidesteps reassuring nostalgia by using these symbols to show an underlying provinciality.