The highlights of London Gallery Weekend (LGW) for digital art lovers epitomise the global “de-siloing” of digital art, where change-making media artists—including Auriea Harvey, Tyler Hobbs, Beeple and Robert Alice—riff on digital-to-physical and physical-to-digital work. They represent a multi-generational vanguard in media art where painting, craftwork and sculpture can be the outcome, or output, of working with video, code, the blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI).
LGW dovetails nicely with the concluding sessions of the first South By Southwest London (SXSW London) festival. SXSW London—across multiple venues in Shoreditch, east London—is the first European iteration of the SXSW tech and music event long established in Austin, Texas, and has added a strong visual arts strand to the South By brand. Beeple’s interactive video sculpture Tree of Knowledge has caused a sensation with visitors.
The festival—where The Art Newspaper moderated a panel on artistic process—has emphasised London’s place as a digital art capital with a particular emphasis on cross-disciplinary work. Such work can be found across multiple galleries participating in LGW: from LoVid’s 25-year interplay with video and hand-stitched textiles at Gazelli Art House to David Salle, at Thaddaeus Ropac, developing and working with an AI model—to painterly effect.
LoVid, Extant Maculata (2020)
© The artist. Courtesy Gazelli Art House
LoVid, Threaded Frequencies
Gazelli Art House, 39 Dover St, W1S 4NN
The interdisciplinary duo LoVid (made up of the New York-based artists Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) bring their ever-playful take on the blurred boundaries between physical and digital art to Threaded Frequencies. LoVid have been experimenting for nearly 25 years with sonic-dissonance and visual glitches in old-school video formats—and their physical analogues in digitally imaged, hand-stitched, textiles.
The duo’s show features cell-a-scape (2015), a four-and-a-half-minute video meditation on leaves and their technological simulation, played in sync with a rhythmic electronic sound track. Alongside this is Extant Maculata (Landscape) (2020), which was created through a process of what a gallery statement describes as “digital imaging, dye-sublimation, and hand embellishment”.
David Salle: Some Versions of Pastoral. installation view at Thaddaeus Ropac London
Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul. Photo: Eva Herzog
David Salle, Some Versions of Pastoral
Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover St, W1S 4NJ
David Salle—a star in the New York City art firmament for four decades—has worked over the past two years with the engineer Grant Davis on training an AI model to serve as a tool in his work. The data sets they used, in a long process of trial and error, included Salle’s thick-brush sketches of figures in space and the artist's existing series Pastorals (1999-2000).
The AI generates intriguing machine-learning backgrounds that recall Salle’s existing paintings. The artist prints them on linen as backdrops, then responds by painting overlapping, dramatised groupings of vividly pigmented everyday objects: fragmented figures, male and female, in bathing suits or sun dresses, plaid skirts and bikinis. The resulting work, expansively installed at Thaddaeus Ropac in Some Versions of Pastoral, represents a process that, Salle told The Art Newspaper, has “been so rewarding … [and] inviting [of] my intervention” as an artist. In the process Salle’s own “ability to respond with a brush” has developed, he says, “in addition to the machine imagery evolving”.
Installation shot of Máté Orr, The Hills Are Not as Close as They Seem, at JD Malat Gallery
www.robharrisphotographer.com
Máté Orr, The Hills Are Not as Close as They Seem
JD Malat Gallery, 30 Davies Street, Mayfair, W1K 4NB
The Hungary-born Máté Orr has an intriguing digital-first process for creating his folklore-infused, mildly uncanny paintings of human-animal interaction. The Budapest and Sicily-based former student of graphic design, printmaking and anatomy, starts by creating dark-and-light, notan-like compositions using the ubiquitous commercial design software Adobe Illustrator. Orr's finished compositions in oils use a distinctly Surreal palette.
They maintain their digital “edge” in their portrayal—reflected in titles like A Diver Attacked By Waterbirds, (2024) and An Unperceived Threat Is Still A Threat (2024)—of humans going toe-to-toe, psychologically and physically, with the artist's distinctly Mitteleuropean-fairy-tale school of swans, geese, heron and other awkwardly angular breeds of birdlife.
- London Gallery Weekend, various venues, 6-8 June
- The Art Newspaper is a media partner of London Gallery Weekend
