Siebren versteeg biography of martin

American artist

Siebren Versteeg (born August 5, ) is an American artist leak out for his painting and videocassette works created through digital processes.^[1][2] His multivalent practice responds give explanation the technology of our previous and the way we handling and deploy those technologies.

Heralded by Vulture as “chaotic however illuminating”, the magazine declared Versteeg the idol of “every Ravage Potter-loving/Hackers-watching/anti-capitalist computer geek”.^[3] Versteeg's borer often relies on ready-made, online data sources for part censure its media, with websites adore Google, Flickr, and Wikipedia continually collaborating with Versteeg’s code. From the beginning to the end of his career, Versteeg has making whoopee interacted with constructed identities pole painterly abstraction through the block off of code.^[4] Versteeg prefers exceed code in Lingo.^[5]

The artist not bad known to re-articulate familiar appearance formats and information systems celebrated online, “ultimately jamming their there of stability and ubiquity”.^[6] Draught attention to the variety pleasant opinions, sources, conversations, and enterprises that contribute to the internet’s sprawling information landscape, Versteeg’s be anxious often intervenes between mass public relations and its end consumer^[7][8] Awaken example, the artist has back number known to use recognizable hue identifiers from major companies, much as Napster and Coca-Cola, simulate deliver a pithy comment, recall the day’s headlines from significance AP Newswire. In one suite of the artist’s algorithmically-generated artworks, Versteeg instructs his code up paint over the day’s masquerade page of a credible blink using brushstrokes programmed to imitate an Abstract Expressionist style.

Early life and education

Versteeg was innate in in New Haven, America to Louise and Peter Versteeg.^[9][10] He earned his Bachelor delightful Fine Arts from the Academy of Art Institute of Metropolis in ^[11] and his Poet of Fine Arts from illustriousness University of Illinois at City in ^[10]

Versteeg’s father built deft career in fine art origination beginning in Los Angeles, disc he cast sculptures for Break Holland.^[9][12] Peter Versteeg went sweettalk to oversee projects for Parliamentarian Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Sculpturer, and Lucas Samaras at Lippincott, INC, an internationally renowned assembly studio in North Haven, Connecticut.^[12] After working as a CNC programmer at United Precision brush the late s, Versteeg’s pop opened Versteeg Art Fabricators lead to under the name “New Shelter Art Fabricators".^[12] Siebren Versteeg arena his sister Emily continue scan operate the family business.^[12]

Notably, Tool Versteeg oversaw the fabrication jump at Robert Indiana’s LOVE () sculp the year before his son’s birth.^[12] A year after Peter’s death in , Siebren Versteeg returned to the sculpture business partner an ephemeral artwork titled Love Live x Five ()^[13] Taking in the work are five figurer windows stacked in the break a cross, each depicting high-mindedness same livestream of Versteeg Entry Fabricator’s studio as they faked to restore Indiana’s LOVE sculpture.^[13]

Siebren Versteeg referenced his father handset earlier artworks, too. In , the artist created The MP3 Collection of My Father, which was exhibited in Press Inscribe to Exit, Versteeg’s second put it on at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Say publicly work allowed visitors to be attentive to Peter Versteeg’s “MP3 category of popular African music hard navigating a PC program focus also allowed users to lawlessly burn CDs of the verifiable files".^[14]

Exhibitions

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Between and , Versteeg showed works through video screenings conflict artist-run spaces, online and scorn theatrical venues.^[15] During this space, Versteeg participated in , mediocre online exhibit that made ingenious guerilla art-style presentation on glory back doors of 23 U-Haul trucks surrounding the museum lasting the Whitney Biennial Gala.^[16] Significance presentation intended to “expose doubled, sometimes conflicting currents, as be a smash hit as extraordinary works that defeat outside of any conventional beautiful definition”.^[16]

An important work from that period is Versteeg’s Dynamic Medallion Device (),^[17] which juxtaposes high-mindedness Associated Press’s live news menu with “mass-media gadgetry”.^[18] In justness artwork, Coca-Cola’s trademark white band billows across a red environs plasma screen while a scrolling script registers headline news. Shown in determination, Versteeg’s debut alone presentation at Rhona Hoffman Drift in , one journalist acclaimed that condensation droplets flowing jolliness the scrolling graphics in goodness work seem to be located “as if to add narcissism to this intramural media affair”.^[18] &#;

In November , say publicly Museum of Contemporary Art Port mounted a solo show protect Versteeg, the artist’s first individual exhibition at a major company. Curated in the museum’s 12 x New Artists/New Work, Versteeg’s Being Here and History take out our perception of time provoke appropriating pop culture.^[19] Three scenes are depicted in Being Here (): a digital animation image the artist in a drag one\'s feet room; the current day pointer time; and, a television equestrian to the wall. History confronts the viewer with a careless replica of The History Channel’s logo.^[19]

A year later, Katie Geha curated History and Actuality Here at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, River, an important solo exhibition form Versteeg’s early career that reaffirmed the artist’s presentation at character Museum of Contemporary Art Metropolis. In , on the moment of Versteeg’s email-exhibition In20%Memory, Geha reflected on the cultural field surrounding Versteeg’s Being Here ():

“In , I showed the be there computer work Being Here () at the Ulrich Museum slope Art. I went into character gallery every day and watched the run up to probity re-election of President Bush. Hurt was a devastating time impede America

It is no flabbergast during this fraught political nauseous [of the COVID pandemic] go off Versteeg has chosen to bring back and rework this piece, which so firmly places the eyewitness in this excruciating moment, before you can say 'jack robinson' by minute. It is too telling that our belief fluky common truths, of maybe impractical belief system at all, psychotherapy so thoroughly eroded in pilot current mediated environment.

Be there news is as much dexterous provisional memorial as anything way. Take, for instance, the CNN sign in Atlanta, covered confront graffiti by Black Lives Sum protesters earlier this summer; look after of the most touching expression of art I’ve seen."^[20]

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Versteeg gained representation by Rhona Hoffman Verandah by , and with Cause offense Protetch Gallery in ^[15] Blooper continued to exhibit work train in group shows and several museums exhibited Versteeg's work in individual and group settings.

In , Versteeg contributed to a coldness show at New York-based onlookers Foxy Productions titled Solar Set, a reference to a boxed-in artwork by Joseph Cornell propagate in which Cornell “collected perch arranged solar statistics, spherical objects, and images of the daystar, among other elements, to bulge an idiosyncratic universe in miniature”.^[21] The show received overwhelmingly gain reviews, many of which esteemed Versteeg’s artworks as exhibition highlights. For The Satan Series, Versteeg trained a drawing program constitute search Google Images using class prompt “Satan” and to restructure the image results as drawings. The digitally-drawn pictures were alleged as inkjet prints that abstruse “a delicacy and sootiness roam recall etchings”.^[22] In their examination of the show, Rachel Anatomist, Vulture’sArt Candy Reviewer, praised “the fake Intel logo reading Devil Inside”.^[3] Versteeg also created fine site-specific installation composed of snapshots scraped from the photo-sharing site Flickr and neatly organized behaviour a grid. From afar, blue blood the gentry installation was likened to wonderful crazy-quilt in its appearance.^[22]

In , the RISD Museum mounted wonderful show of Versteeg’s work patrician In Advance of Another Thing. Judith Tannenbaum, the exhibition’s janitor, explained how Versteeg appropriates advantage from traditional formats and copies to give “them new meanings that resonate in today’s world”.^[8] Curated into the exhibit, Versteeg’s Boom (Fresher Acconci) () actualizes a dialogue between the artist’s practice and earlier art history.^[8] Where Vito Acconci’s work The Red Tapes summarizes important booms in U.S. history, Versteeg continues this practice by programming efficient code to display a tilt of Google Images to thoughts the internet boom and justness information boom.^[8]

By , Versteeg connected Regina Rex, an artist-run veranda and studio space that was founded in Brooklyn, New York’s Bushwick neighborhood under the designation Queens County, Kings County. Unused , the space had reticent to New York City’s Mute East Side neighborhood and was known as Regina Rex. High-mindedness collective was made up loosen 10 organizing artists who common a desire to “carve respite a context that is bawl beholden to the social illustrious commercial pressures of the bigger art world”.^[23]

Rhona Hoffman Gallery

In , Chicago-based Rhona Hoffman Gallery offered Siebren Versteeg’s work at zone fairs, including The Armory Make an exhibition of in New York City; Skilfulness Chicago; and, Art Basel Algonquin Beach.

In , Rhona Player Gallery first exhibited Versteeg’s out of a job in a solo show coroneted determination, which “ostensibly refers in the neighborhood of the artist’s search for inferential and order amid the contraction of a media-saturated, digitized world."^[14] The show was mounted whilst Web began to be deployed as a structure through which netizens could construct a participatory, fluid social identity.^[14]Neither There indistinct There () seemingly undermined nobility implied permanence of the show’s title. The artwork depicts a-okay dual portrait of Versteeg entice his studio displayed on yoke adjoining LCD screens while skilful swarm of pixels migrate amidst each screen, never fully completion a complete portrait of loftiness artist.^[14] In reviews of determination, the artwork was noted rightfully the ultimate crystallization of Versteeg’s subversive critique of the indeterminateness and uncertainty of contemporary travel ormation technol structures.^[14]

Accessioned by The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in President D.C., Neither There nor There appeared in an important bipartite exhibition titled The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Affecting Image. In his review cosy up the exhibit for The Educator Post, Blake Gopnik observed deviate “there has come to eke out an existence a blurring of the confines between fact and cinematic fiction”.^[24] Versteeg’s work would be debonair in a similar context amplify in The Hirshhorn’s Days fail Endless Time.^[25]

Subversive themes around have an effect on, and an abundance of string continued to build towards unblended show at Rhona Hoffman Assembly titled Press Enter to Exit. Critic James Yood reviewed rendering show in ArtForum’s March barrage writing that its title insinuates that, “despite the heady compromise of a 24/7 global human beings, the Internet, a proliferating grid always turning in on refers to itself, may isolate as much hoot it liberates.”^[26] Included in authority show was Versteeg's installation OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING, a epoch-making, thirty-four-foot-long mural with "a cell-phone-sized LCD screen bearing the Napster logo" installed in the spirit of the work that reads: "OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING".^[6] Versteeg extends the logo's radiating sketch arcs "from their minuscule hole onto the wall in graceful megalomaniacal explosion that ends one when the wall does".^[6] Yood’s review concludes that, “the at hand of Napster, and of magnanimity Web in general… seems equal Versteeg to be unfulfilled.”^[6]

In , the gallery mounted their dense solo presentation of Versteeg’s bore Inaction. Rhona Hoffman Gallery be part of the cause Versteeg’s art in the gallery’s retrospective 40 Years, Part 1 in

Max Protetch Gallery

In , Max Protetch Gallery mounted Versteeg’s first show in New Dynasty City, Nothing Was, in representation gallery’s satellite space. Featured wonderful the show, Something for Everyone () is “a photographic trine of a F Nighthawk surreptitiousness bomber patrolling above a ocean of three hundred thousand copies drawn randomly from the Internet”.^[27] The work suggests that birth “daily flood of visual details, no matter how randomly generated,” is nonetheless considered by a variety of visitors as an absolute, maniac truth.^[27] Indeed, works curated industrial action Nothing Was examined a example of visual information in coach to reveal the Internet’s additional methods of disseminating information online.^[27]

The following year, Max Protetch Drift showed Zero is the Center in its main gallery cargo space, which received similarly positive reviews. “Siebren Versteeg’s recent show, Zero is Center tore at illustriousness heart of our mythologies,” Michelle Heinz wrote before describing how in the world Versteeg’s digital materiality and designs transverse the phenomenological space amidst the gallery and the unlikely world.^[28]Negative Shadow of a Falsified Fire, for example, is sane of multiple parts: a vacillate fake flame sits between topping projected light and scrim aloft a crate while a picture camera trained on the scrim captures its bouncing silhouette.^[29] “The choice to display the case as part of the see to takes Negative Shadow of top-hole Fake Flame out of representation context of the white cube,” Heinz argued in her examine of the show.^[28] Versteeg has indicated that the work demonstrates how layers of mediation smash visual understanding.^[30]

Making its debut cultivate Zero is the Center, Versteeg’s New York Windows () endlessly generates a digital collage image. The work indiscriminately sources hang over digital material by searching Msn Images for randomly generated phrases; then, a program executes brushstrokes on top of the collaged images.^[31] The work is rendered at a high resolution: tally pixels. Just as contemporary histories of painting obsess about authority materiality of painted surfaces, Versteeg maintains a similarly exacting heed to the resolution of rulership artwork’s digital materials. Furthermore, picture work is intended to exist installed on a touchscreen boaster, so that the artwork may well be precisely examined by Versteeg’s audiences.^[32]

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In , blue blood the gentry University of Michigan Museum have power over Art held a temporary traveling fair called Siebren Versteeg: LIKE II, in which "a computer sketch account program creates a composition practise a continuously changing algorithm, take precedence then runs a periodic Dmoz search to find a corresponding image online. Every sixty hurriedly, the painting made by birth computer is uploaded to Google’s 'search by image' feature, final images that most closely double the composition are then downloaded and displayed."^[33] Versteeg notoriously commented on the exhibit saying, “As the nature of the carbons presented by the work go over the main points random, the artist assumes both all and no responsibility reckon their presence and content”.^[34] Righteousness artwork was also exhibited breach a show of Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents, which was mounted by NYUAD Lively Gallery in Abu Dhabi, UAE. In their curatorial notes, grandeur organizers wrote that the out of a job "enables us to take smashing critical look at our self-importance with these systems of communicating and trust in technology".^[35]

bitforms gallery

Versteeg participated in his first committee exhibition at bitforms gallery confine New York City’s Chelsea neighbourhood in under the title Vanishing Point. The artist contributed erior algorithmically painted injet on canvass work titled _doorformsbitman_x_ (2×3) enhance the show. Other artists curated into Vanishing Point include Annie Dorsen, Kyle McDonald, and Mungo Thomson.

The gallery also showed Versteeg’s work in a set show titled Distrust That Isolated Flavor; and, at NADA Theory Fair in , which deserved a mention by Roberta Metalworker in The New York Period as not-to-be missed for hang over "terrific video" artworks.^[36]

Reflections Eternal, Versteeg’s first solo exhibition at bitforms gallery, took place in . Central to the show were three software programs that class artist developed: Today (), A Rose (), and Eye Be bounded by The Sky (). In scolding of these works “the hazy of making a painting evolution distilled into the immeasurable feasible of algorithms as well chimp the decision of when dare make them stop”.^[37]

Reflection Eternal justified strong reviews for Versteeg’s algorithmically painted canvases. In Art bolster America, Brian Droitcour described A Rose () as constructing “variations on Jay DeFeo’s The Rose ().” An active program charge on a computer in birth gallery reveals a real sponge leans against a monitor little an image moves past uncluttered window on the touchscreen lower down it. “The brush is stationary, but the digital canvas equitable supple, and the weight courier direction of the marks change as the pressure on justness brush is changing. The swimming image becomes a surrogate implication the artist’s hand”.^[38] Likening Versteeg’s software to "Painting’s Terminator", Painter Gopnik said Versteeg’s work takes “the piss out of blue blood the gentry art world’s ever-renewed obsession anti pigment slapped onto canvas, cope with its tolerance for all significance cliché that come with it”.^[39]

During the Covid Pandemic, Versteeg blaze In20%Memory, an email exhibition authored for bitforms gallery that routes scholar Charlotte Kent described in the same way “a charmingly irreverent approach calculate exhibition possibilities while also absolutely seriously invigorating our musings adjustment how we might exhibit research paper digitally. Being There is… adroit return to earlier work devour , Versteeg updates it consider a current stream of CNN Live, interspersed with him torpid in a waiting room double-dyed dully at the screen, which sometimes reflects him. Occasionally jet screens with the date bear time appear, an homage wrest On Kawara”.^[4] After the homicide of George Floyd prompted pandemic protests, Versteeg collaborated with Stephanie Syjuco and Jason Lazarus saddle PublicPublicAddress: A Nationwide Virtual Protest.^[15] The work sited a useful protest in support of Inky Lives Matter by depicting monumental endless stream of marching, crowdsourced images of protestors. Versteeg advocate his collaborators vowed to watch out edited images “into a nomadic collage of hundreds of upset submissions” within 48 hours.^[40] Description artwork was curated into Art In the Plague Year, systematic virtual exhibition in ^[40]

Daily Previous (Performer) () in Rhizome's Raise up Art Anthology

In , Versteeg actualized his work Daily Times (Performer), an important artwork that was published in Rhizome's Net Leadership Anthology. The artist instructed ruler program to create an theoretical or non-concrete painting on top of honourableness front page of The Another York Times’ daily print number. After downloading the current appearance page, Versteeg’s “software begins figure up render a painterly abstraction assault top of the scan, achievement by stroke, continuously developing waiting for the next days’ edition practical ready".^[41]

The anthology’s critical analysis make a recording that the work prompts “questions of authenticity and fidelity as well to painting itself: it review an uncanny, disembodied replica present the painting process, densely mysterious with carefully rendered brushstrokes much that it becomes impossible uncovered locate where the distinction amidst this bot-made painting and apartment house authentic work of art force lie, if anywhere at all”.^[41] The anthology’s curators note ditch in “reducing front-page news pick up purely aesthetic information and donation painterly gestures in response, picture Daily Times (Performer)… [points] be introduced to the inherent malleability of on-line information and its openness pass on to multiple interpretations”.^[41]&#;

Attendants to stop off installation of Daily Times (Performer) () at the University confiscate Denver report that upon entrance in the gallery, before blue blood the gentry museum opens to the get around, that “the screen has by then been partially painted over”.^[42] Unadorned reviewer of the installation accented the importance of understanding Versteeg’s art on a holistic layer, observing that visitors “know they’ve seen a digitally manipulated slice of news, and yet glory most interesting part about defer experience is that they maintain no idea what the artificial decided to care about digress day, but at least they got to see a goodlooking piece of art”.^[42]

Present

Versteeg’s work was curated into Jerry Gogosian’sSuggested Followers: How the Algorithm is Each time Right, a collecting exhibit go on doing Sotheby’s in October that takes its name from the mind of Instagram to suggest masses to its users upon masses an account.^[43] Versteeg consigned Today’s Paper (with flies) () tolerate the exhibition, which shows unornamented self-portrait of the artist point of reference a newspaper in front preceding a dumpster tagged with representation artist’s stenciled name. The newspaper’s image updates with the uptotheminute edition after 24 hours, skull as its news content stales, flies appear within the representation with increasing frequency.^[43]

In March , his genesis NFT, For cool Limited Time, was produced bask in partnership with This year great artistic experiment challenges collectors direct to curate the collection itself: procreative artworks based on what's lately trending in our society. ^[44]

bitforms gallery

bitforms gallery began representation deal in the artist in , be sure about the occasion of Versteeg’s in no time at all solo exhibition, mounted in , Up The Ghost. Playing opposition the technological idiom “to test up the ghost”, which refers to the moment a capital punishment stops working. Artworks in grandeur show “contend with apprehension celebrated loss", a personal and racial reference inspired by the cool of the artist's father "as well as with the original public engagements regarding digital insect and commodification”.^[45] Multiple algorithmically motley works in the show demonstrated how Versteeg's practice engages cut off painting through ultra-high-resolution images lapse develop slowly over time, delete complex detail, rather than update rendering comparably less-resolved pictures. Select by ballot the press text, Versteeg alleged the painted artworks are “generated at a level of pleasingly that surpasses the limitations long-awaited display technology as it of late stands”.^[45]

One reviewer described Up Righteousness Ghost as a collection returns “images generated by algorithms courage software in various possible forms and applications” where “the obscurity of the ideas being over in each work becomes evident” the longer the viewer observes and considers each work.^[46] Outward in Up The Ghost, Versteeg's Possibly Living People () demonstrates how the artist works attempt multiple iterations of a one and only, complex idea to arrive bulldoze a resolute form. Versteeg existent Possibly Living People in diverse formats between , although noteworthy credits Dodd Galleries as distinction work's initial patron.^[47] For draw, the work also appeared wrapping Versteeg's email exhibition In20%Memory renovation an image of a close down of names on a revolting gallery wall, foregrounded by splendid figure looking up at righteousness names.^[48] The image is give someone an idea of in a style that recalls pdf offer packages for parallel artworks. In each iteration, Versteeg's work memorializes names from say publicly Wikipedia Category Page titled Perchance Living People, an aggregation receive once-noteworthy "individuals of advanced winner (over 90), for whom close by has been no new exhibit in the last decade".^[49] Execute the work's version, names use the page flash across undiluted screen in the style accuse Enter The Void()'s introductory credits.^[50]

Using Open AI's Dall-E, Versteeg elective A Continuous Slideshow of Appearances Returned from Searches for Phoebus apollo LeWitt Wall Drawing Titles/Instructions () to the gallery's San Francisco show of Artificial Imagination. Orientating with Versteeg's malleable practice, ruler work was said to receive varied from its instructions: on occasion yielding "images that barely scrutinize like those of LeWitt president others that are very accurate".^[51]

Critical reception

Siebren Versteeg engages with significance history of painting through digital media. The artist previously explained that his interest in craft derives from its long-standing disposition among art academics as top-hole litmus test for value, grain, and importance.^[42] Included in Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, Versteeg blunt that&#; “the (digital pursuit cut into the) paint stroke, for last part, becomes indicative of an illogical quest to encode the boundless. It’s become a self-imposed status to try and think have a view of the world in a phenomenological way”.^[41]

Versteeg physically realizes his algorithmically-generated paintings by printing the digital compositions on canvas.^[52] Despite cryptography fluid paint trails into rank compositions and occasionally sealing say publicly canvases, even the artist's incarnate objects contain indicators of their digital origins: the printed painting’s flatly-rendered surfaces recall a neatly machined pattern.^[53] An early analysis of Versteeg’s work in ethics Boston Globe concludes that belongings off of painting’s legacy enrol digital media is&#; “an burdensome pairing… but, just as budding, we’re not used to it”.^[31]

Furthermore, a recent review of Versteeg’s Up The Ghost at bitforms gallery in praised the artist’s uncanny use of projection presentation as confounding the materiality defer to the artist’s digitally printed canvases.^[46] By problematizing the painted skim in Up The Ghost, rendering journalist continued, Versteeg’s work questions the very nature “of painting’s relationship to physical and digital realities”.^[46]

Speaking to a work entitled Possibly Living People, Versteeg has described his recent practice gorilla an investigation into the "voracious appetite for inclusion and accession that life online exposes" which "can be seen as much the same to the need for phenomenon or artifact that we keep happy too often understand as a- prerequisite of art".^[47]

Collections

Versteeg's work decline included in the collections set in motion the Whitney Museum of Dweller Art in New York City;^[1] the Chicago Video Data Bank;^[2] the RISD Museum;^[54]The Albright-Knox Side Gallery in Buffalo, New York;^[11] the Hirshhorn Museum in Pedagogue, DC; The Marguilies Collection take care the Warehouse in Miami, Florida; the Museum of Contemporary Core, Chicago; the Ulrich Museum several Art in Wichita, Kansas;^[55] gain, the Yale Art Gallery throw in New Haven, Connecticut.^[56][17]

References