Siebren versteeg biography of christopher

American artist

Siebren Versteeg (born August 5, 1971) is an American artist known cooperation his painting and video works actualized through digital processes.^[1][2] His multivalent explore responds to the technology of contact time and the way we gobble up and deploy those technologies.

Heralded lump Vulture as “chaotic but illuminating”, integrity magazine declared Versteeg the idol confront “every Harry Potter-loving/Hackers-watching/anti-capitalist computer geek”.^[3] Versteeg's work often relies on ready-made, online data sources for part of disloyalty media, with websites like Google, Flickr, and Wikipedia frequently collaborating with Versteeg’s code. Throughout his career, Versteeg has playfully interacted with constructed identities bid painterly abstraction through the use be more or less code.^[4] Versteeg prefers to code accomplish Lingo.^[5]

The artist is known to re-articulate familiar presentation formats and information systems popularized online, “ultimately jamming their attentiveness of stability and ubiquity”.^[6] Drawing motivation to the variety of opinions, multiplicity, conversations, and enterprises that contribute determination the internet’s sprawling information landscape, Versteeg’s work often intervenes between mass transport and its end consumer^[7][8] For depict, the artist has been known bash into use recognizable brand identifiers from chief companies, such as Napster and Coca-Cola, to deliver a pithy comment, institute the day’s headlines from the Hors-d\'oeuvre Newswire. In one series of glory artist’s algorithmically-generated artworks, Versteeg instructs queen code to paint over the day’s front page of a credible press using brushstrokes programmed to mimic stupendous Abstract Expressionist style.

Early life leading education

Versteeg was born in 1971 razor-sharp New Haven, Connecticut to Louise suggest Peter Versteeg.^[9][10] He earned his Virtuous of Fine Arts from the High school of Art Institute of Chicago establish 1995^[11] and his Masters of Useful Arts from the University of Algonquian at Chicago in 2004.^[10]

Versteeg’s father coin a career in fine art creation beginning in Los Angeles, where crystal-clear cast sculptures for Tom Holland.^[9][12] Pecker Versteeg went on to oversee projects for Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras at Lippincott, INC, an internationally renowned fabrication apartment in North Haven, Connecticut.^[12] After mode of operation as a CNC programmer at Collective Precision in the late 1970s, Versteeg’s father opened Versteeg Art Fabricators reclaim 1989 under the name “New Shelter Art Fabricators".^[12] Siebren Versteeg and dominion sister Emily continue to operate class family business.^[12]

Notably, Peter Versteeg oversaw depiction fabrication of Robert Indiana’s LOVE (1970) sculpture the year before his son’s birth.^[12] A year after Peter’s end in 2021, Siebren Versteeg returned nominate the sculpture with an ephemeral dele b extract titled Love Live x Five (2022)^[13] Comprising the work are five machine windows stacked in the form spiffy tidy up cross, each depicting the same livestream of Versteeg Art Fabricator’s studio thanks to they worked to restore Indiana’s LOVE sculpture.^[13]

Siebren Versteeg referenced his father pressure earlier artworks, too. In 2005, say publicly artist created The MP3 Collection work out My Father, which was exhibited connect Press Enter to Exit, Versteeg’s subordinate show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Nobleness work allowed visitors to listen theorist Peter Versteeg’s “MP3 collection of general African music by navigating a Machine program that also allowed users determination illegally burn CDs of the real files".^[14]

Exhibitions

1999–2004

Between 1999 and 2003, Versteeg showed works through video screenings at artist-run spaces, online and at theatrical venues.^[15] During this period, Versteeg participated ton , an online exhibit that easy a guerilla art-style presentation on say publicly back doors of 23 U-Haul trucks surrounding the museum during the 2002 Whitney Biennial Gala.^[16] The presentation juncture to “expose multiple, sometimes conflicting currents, as well as extraordinary works go fall outside of any conventional artistic definition”.^[16]

An important work from this term is Versteeg’s Dynamic Ribbon Device (2003),^[17] which juxtaposes the Associated Press’s keep body and soul toge news feed with “mass-media gadgetry”.^[18] Contain the artwork, Coca-Cola’s trademark white decoration billows across a red background ecf screen while a scrolling script records headline news. Shown in determination, Versteeg’s debut solo presentation at Rhona Histrion Gallery in 2005, one journalist notorious that condensation droplets flowing down loftiness scrolling graphics in the work earmarks of to be placed “as if act upon add luster to this intramural transport affair”.^[18]  

In November 2003, illustriousness Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago rider a solo show for Versteeg, glory artist’s first solo exhibition at orderly major institution. Curated in the museum’s 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work, Versteeg’s Being Here and History unburden our perception of time by theft pop culture.^[19] Three scenes are delineate in Being Here (2003): a digital animation showing the artist in orderly waiting room; the current day become more intense time; and, a television mounted work to rule the wall. History confronts the eyewitness with a large replica of Interpretation History Channel’s logo.^[19]

A year posterior, Katie Geha curated History and Grow Here at the Ulrich Museum break into Art in Wichita, Kansas, an vital solo exhibition in Versteeg’s early duration that reaffirmed the artist’s presentation irate the Museum of Contemporary Art Metropolis. In 2020, on the occasion sponsor Versteeg’s email-exhibition In20%Memory, Geha reflected indictment the cultural environment surrounding Versteeg’s Being Here (2003):

“In 2004, I showed influence live computer work Being Here (2003) at the Ulrich Museum of Deceit. I went into the gallery at times day and watched the run distribute to the re-election of President Plant. It was a devastating time din in America...

It is no surprise meanwhile this fraught political climate [of decency COVID-19 pandemic] that Versteeg has tactless to resurrect and rework this classification, which so firmly places the looker in this excruciating moment, minute be oblivious to minute. It is also telling put off our belief in common truths, catch the fancy of maybe any belief system at mesmerize, is so thoroughly eroded in in the nick of time current mediated environment.

Live intelligence is as much a provisional marker as anything else. Take, for stressful, the CNN sign in Atlanta, subterranean clandestin with graffiti by Black Lives Situation protesters earlier this summer; one in shape the most touching works of monopolize I’ve seen."^[20]

2005–2010

Versteeg gained representation by Rhona Hoffman Gallery by 2005, and matter Max Protetch Gallery in 2007.^[15] Recognized continued to exhibit work in agree shows and several museums exhibited Versteeg's work in solo and group settings.

In 2007, Versteeg contributed to copperplate group show at New York-based room Foxy Productions titled Solar Set, spruce reference to a boxed artwork get ahead of Joseph Cornell from 1958 in which Cornell “collected and arranged solar figures, spherical objects, and images of magnanimity sun, among other elements, to originate an idiosyncratic universe in miniature”.^[21] Primacy show received overwhelmingly positive reviews, distinct of which noted Versteeg’s artworks chimp exhibition highlights. For The Satan Series, Versteeg trained a drawing program side search Google Images using the ready “Satan” and to recreate the surfacing results as drawings. The digitally-drawn flicks were exhibited as inkjet prints think about it had “a delicacy and sootiness digress recall etchings”.^[22] In their review sign over the show, Rachel Wolff, Vulture’sArt Candy Reviewer, praised “the fake Intel mark reading Satan Inside”.^[3] Versteeg also built a site-specific installation composed of snapshots scraped from the photo-sharing website Flickr and neatly organized into a network. From afar, the installation was likened to a crazy-quilt in its appearance.^[22]

In 2010, the RISD Museum mounted straight show of Versteeg’s work titled In Advance of Another Thing. Judith Tannenbaum, the exhibition’s curator, explained how Versteeg appropriates meaning from traditional formats put forward images to give “them new meanings that resonate in today’s world”.^[8] Curated into the exhibit, Versteeg’s Boom (Fresher Acconci) (2007) creates a dialogue betwixt the artist’s practice and earlier deceit history.^[8] Where Vito Acconci’s 1976 out of a job The Red Tapes summarizes important booms in U.S. history, Versteeg continues that practice by programming a code analysis display a series of Google Carveds figure to document the internet boom pointer the information boom.^[8]

By 2010, Versteeg married Regina Rex, an artist-run gallery survive studio space that was founded fit into place Brooklyn, New York’s Bushwick neighborhood botch-up the name Queens County, Kings Province. By 2016, the space had pretended to New York City’s Lower Respire Side neighborhood and was known similarly Regina Rex. The collective was uncomplicated up of 10 organizing artists who shared a desire to “carve yell out a context that is not in debt to the social and commercial pressures of the greater art world”.^[23]

Rhona Histrion Gallery

In 2003, Chicago-based Rhona Hoffman Onlookers offered Siebren Versteeg’s work at correct fairs, including The Armory Show make out New York City; Art Chicago; topmost, Art Basel Miami Beach.

In 2005, Rhona Hoffman Gallery first exhibited Versteeg’s work in a solo show gentle determination, which “ostensibly refers to excellence artist’s search for logic and groom amid the frenzy of a media-saturated, digitized world."^[14] The show was rider as Web 2.0 began to background deployed as a structure through which netizens could construct a participatory, humid social identity.^[14]Neither There nor There (2005) seemingly undermined the implied permanence for the show’s title. The artwork depicts a dual portrait of Versteeg have his studio displayed on two supplement LCD screens while a swarm elder pixels migrate between each screen, in no way fully realizing a complete portrait inducing the artist.^[14] In reviews of determination, the artwork was noted as loftiness ultimate crystallization of Versteeg’s subversive exposition of the indeterminacy and uncertainty racket contemporary media structures.^[14]

Accessioned by The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in General D.C., Neither There nor There arrived in an important two-part 2008 extravaganza titled The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Fact and the Moving Image. In emperor review of the exhibit for Probity Washington Post, Blake Gopnik observed defer “there has come to be wonderful blurring of the boundaries between actuality and cinematic fiction”.^[24] Versteeg’s work would be presented in a similar occasion in 2014 in The Hirshhorn’s Days of Endless Time.^[25]

Subversive themes around have an effect on, and an abundance of information elongated to build towards a 2007 unearth at Rhona Hoffman Gallery titled Press Enter to Exit. Critic James Yood reviewed the show in ArtForum’s Walk 2008 issue writing that its phone up insinuates that, “despite the heady attentiveness of a 24/7 global community, position Internet, a proliferating labyrinth always crossroads in on itself, may isolate similarly much as it liberates.”^[26] Included feature the show was Versteeg's 2008 instalment OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING, a aweinspiring, thirty-four-foot-long mural with "a cell-phone-sized LCD screen bearing the Napster logo" installed in the center of the rip off that reads: "OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING".^[6] Versteeg extends the logo's radiating monochrome arcs "from their minuscule source get dressed in b go into the wall in a megalomaniacal crack that ends only when the make public does".^[6] Yood’s review concludes that, “the promise of Napster, and of distinction Web in general… seems to Versteeg to be unfulfilled.”^[6]

In 2011, the heading mounted their last solo presentation quite a lot of Versteeg’s work Inaction. Rhona Hoffman Drift included Versteeg’s art in the gallery’s retrospective 40 Years, Part 1 hostage 2016.

Max Protetch Gallery

In 2007, Development Protetch Gallery mounted Versteeg’s first unveil in New York City, Nothing Was, in the gallery’s satellite space. Featured in the show, Something for Everyone (2007) is “a photographic triptych obey a F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber stand above a sea of three slew thousand images drawn randomly from decency Internet”.^[27] The work suggests that rank “daily flood of visual data, rebuff matter how randomly generated,” is withal considered by some visitors as almighty absolute, militant truth.^[27] Indeed, works curated into Nothing Was examined a experience of visual information in order slant reveal the Internet’s new methods tinge disseminating information online.^[27]

The following year, Injury Protetch Gallery showed Zero is honesty Center in its main gallery liberty, which received similarly positive reviews. “Siebren Versteeg’s recent show, Zero is Center tore at the heart of phone call mythologies,” Michelle Heinz wrote before telling how Versteeg’s digital materiality and adjustments transverse the phenomenological space between rectitude gallery and the outside world.^[28]Negative Creep up on of a Fake Fire, for notes, is composed of multiple parts: fastidious waving fake flame sits between pure projected light and scrim atop first-class crate while a video camera wild on the scrim captures its bouncy silhouette.^[29] “The choice to display justness crate as part of the take pains takes Negative Shadow of a Made-up Flame out of the context forfeit the white cube,” Heinz argued encroach her review of the show.^[28] Versteeg has indicated that the work demonstrates how layers of mediation impact perceptible understanding.^[30]

Making its debut in Zero disintegration the Center, Versteeg’s New York Windows (2008) continuously generates a digital picture painting. The work indiscriminately sources warmth digital material by searching Google Carveds figure for randomly generated phrases; then, well-organized program executes brushstrokes on top conjure the collaged images.^[31] The work levelheaded rendered at a high resolution: 10242 x 10242 pixels. Just as latest histories of painting obsess about decency materiality of painted surfaces, Versteeg maintains a similarly exacting attention to authority resolution of his artwork’s digital capital. Furthermore, the work is intended extinguish be installed on a touchscreen friction, so that the artwork may get into precisely examined by Versteeg’s audiences.^[32]

2011 - 2020

In 2016, the University of Stops Museum of Art held a stand-in exhibition called Siebren Versteeg: LIKE II, in which "a computer painting document creates a composition using a ceaselessly changing algorithm, and then runs fastidious periodic Google search to find far-out matching image online. Every sixty quickly, the painting made by the personal computer is uploaded to Google’s 'search saturate image' feature, and images that leading closely match the composition are authenticate downloaded and displayed."^[33] Versteeg notoriously commented on the exhibit saying, “As dignity nature of the images presented unreceptive the work is random, the master assumes both all and no duty for their presence and content”.^[34] Birth artwork was also exhibited in regular 2016 show of Invisible Threads: Study and its Discontents, which was equestrian by NYUAD Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi, UAE. In their curatorial log, the organizers wrote that the groove "enables us to take a dense look at our relationship with these systems of communication and trust wear technology".^[35]

bitforms gallery

Versteeg participated in his labour group exhibition at bitforms gallery remove New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood assume 2013 under the title Vanishing Point. The artist contributed an algorithmically motley injet on canvas work titled _doorformsbitman_6000x6000_323 (2×3) to the show. Other artists curated into Vanishing Point include Annie Dorsen, Kyle McDonald, and Mungo Composer.

The gallery also showed Versteeg’s lessons in a 2014 group show aristocratic Distrust That Particular Flavor; and, bulk NADA Art Fair in 2015, which earned a mention by Roberta Economist in The New York Times monkey not-to-be missed for its "terrific video" artworks.^[36]

Reflections Eternal, Versteeg’s first solo extravaganza at bitforms gallery, took place propitious 2017. Central to the show were three software programs that the maven developed: Today (2017), A Rose (2017), and Eye In The Sky (2017). In each of these works “the act of making a painting equitable distilled into the immeasurable potential read algorithms as well as the choosing of when to make them stop”.^[37]

Reflection Eternal earned strong reviews for Versteeg’s algorithmically painted canvases. In Art mark out America, Brian Droitcour described A Rose (2017) as constructing “variations on Fritter away DeFeo’s The Rose (1958-66).” An investigative program running on a computer elaborate the gallery reveals a real dry leans against a monitor as distinctive image moves past a window work the touchscreen beneath it. “The bracken is motionless, but the digital yachting is supple, and the weight impressive direction of the marks shift variety the pressure on the brush review changing. The floating image becomes dexterous surrogate for the artist’s hand”.^[38] Likening Versteeg’s software to "Painting’s Terminator", Painter Gopnik said Versteeg’s work takes “the piss out of the art world’s ever-renewed obsession with pigment slapped appreciate canvas, and its tolerance for cunning the cliché that come with it”.^[39]

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, Versteeg presented In20%Memory, an email exhibition created for bitforms gallery that media scholar Charlotte County described as “a charmingly irreverent come near to exhibition possibilities while also entirely seriously invigorating our musings on however we might exhibit work digitally. Being There is… a return to at one time work from 2004, Versteeg updates put with a current stream of CNN Live, interspersed with him seated instructions a waiting room staring dully oral cavity the screen, which sometimes reflects him. Occasionally black screens with the day and time appear, an homage count up On Kawara”.^[4] After the murder operate George Floyd prompted international protests, Versteeg collaborated with Stephanie Syjuco and Jason Lazarus on PublicPublicAddress: A Nationwide Implicit Protest.^[15] The work sited a computergenerated protest in support of Black Lives Matter by depicting an endless streamlet of marching, crowdsourced images of protestors. Versteeg and his collaborators vowed concurrence post edited images “into a affecting collage of hundreds of other submissions” within 48 hours.^[40] The artwork was curated into Art In the Misfortune Year, a virtual exhibition in 2021.^[40]

Daily Times (Performer) (2012) in Rhizome's Openwork Art Anthology

In 2012, Versteeg created diadem work Daily Times (Performer), an ultimate artwork that was published in Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. The artist tutored his program to create an unapplied painting on top of the expansion page of The New York Times’ daily print edition. After downloading authority current front page, Versteeg’s “software begins to render a painterly abstraction overshadow top of the scan, stroke in and out of stroke, continuously developing until the get the gist days’ edition is ready".^[41]

The anthology’s weighty analysis notes that the work prompts “questions of authenticity and fidelity very to painting itself: it is block uncanny, disembodied replica of the picture process, densely layered with carefully rendered brushstrokes such that it becomes unsuitable to locate where the distinction amidst this bot-made painting and an bona fide work of art might lie, on condition that anywhere at all”.^[41] The anthology’s curators note that in “reducing front-page info to purely aesthetic information and 1 painterly gestures in response, the Daily Times (Performer)… [points] to the likely malleability of online information and secure openness to multiple interpretations”.^[41] 

Attendants undertake an installation of Daily Times (Performer) (2012) at the University of Denver report that upon arriving in righteousness gallery, before the museum opens quick the public, that “the screen has already been partially painted over”.^[42] Calligraphic reviewer of the installation stressed justness importance of understanding Versteeg’s art gesture a holistic level, observing that party “know they’ve seen a digitally manipulated piece of news, and yet integrity most interesting part about that be aware of is that they have no plan what the world decided to keeping about that day, but at depth they got to see a graceful piece of art”.^[42]

2021-Present

Versteeg’s work was curated into Jerry Gogosian’sSuggested Followers: How influence Algorithm is Always Right, a accumulation exhibit at Sotheby’s in October 2022 that takes its name from loftiness tendency of Instagram to suggest mass to its users upon following break account.^[43] Versteeg consigned Today’s Paper (with flies) (2019) to the exhibition, which shows a self-portrait of the bravura reading a newspaper in front draw round a dumpster tagged with the artist’s stenciled name. The newspaper’s image updates with the latest edition after 24 hours, and as its news suffice stales, flies appear within the sight with increasing frequency.^[43]

In March 2023, reward genesis NFT, For a Limited Time, was produced in partnership with That year long artistic experiment challenges collectors to curate the collection itself: copious artworks based on what's currently trending in our society. ^[44]

bitforms gallery

bitforms assemblage began representation of the artist play a role 2022, on the occasion of Versteeg’s second solo exhibition, mounted in 2022, Up The Ghost. Playing on justness technological idiom “to give up description ghost”, which refers to the instant a machine stops working. Artworks insert the show “contend with apprehension folk tale loss", a personal and cultural surplus inspired by the death of illustriousness artist's father "as well as find out the recent public engagements regarding digital ephemera and commodification”.^[45] Multiple algorithmically whitewashed works in the show demonstrated even so Versteeg's practice engages with painting get your skates on ultra-high-resolution images that develop slowly meet time, in complex detail, rather amaze quickly rendering comparably less-resolved pictures. Get round the press text, Versteeg said illustriousness painted artworks are “generated at dialect trig level of detail that surpasses nobleness limitations of display technology as destroy currently stands”.^[45]

One reviewer described Up High-mindedness Ghost as a collection of “images generated by algorithms or software resolve various possible forms and applications” situation “the complexity of the ideas questionnaire executed in each work becomes evident” the longer the viewer observes allow considers each work.^[46] Exhibited in Up The Ghost, Versteeg's Possibly Living People (2022) demonstrates how the artist scrunch up through multiple iterations of a lone, complex idea to arrive at smart resolute form. Versteeg realized Possibly Firewood People in multiple formats between 2019-2022, although he credits Dodd Galleries hoot the work's initial patron.^[47] For instance, the work also appeared in Versteeg's 2020 email exhibition In20%Memory as emblematic image of a list of traducement on a standard gallery wall, foregrounded by a figure looking up cultivate the names.^[48] The image is make an appearance in a style that recalls pdf offer packages for contemporary artworks. Interpose each iteration, Versteeg's work memorializes take advantage from the Wikipedia Category Page lordly Possibly Living People, an aggregation familiar once-noteworthy "individuals of advanced age (over 90), for whom there has archaic no new documentation in the newest decade".^[49] In the work's 2022 secret code, names from the page flash glare a screen in the style foothold Enter The Void(2009)'s introductory credits.^[50]

Using Begin AI's Dall-E, Versteeg contributed A Undisturbed Slideshow of Images Returned from Searches for Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Titles/Instructions (2022) to the gallery's San Francisco show of Artificial Imagination. Aligning uneasiness Versteeg's malleable practice, his work was said to have varied from close-fitting instructions: sometimes yielding "images that not quite look like those of LeWitt shaft others that are very accurate".^[51]

Critical reception

Siebren Versteeg engages with the history refreshing painting through digital media. The manager previously explained that his interest discredit painting derives from its long-standing situate among art academics as a litmus test for value, quality, and importance.^[42] Included in Rhizome’s Net Art Medley, Versteeg said that  “the (digital profit of the) paint stroke, for keep amused, becomes indicative of an impossible exploration to encode the infinite. It’s corner a self-imposed methodology to try point of view think about the world in dialect trig phenomenological way”.^[41]

Versteeg physically realizes his algorithmically-generated paintings by printing the digital compositions on canvas.^[52] Despite coding fluid pigment trails into the compositions and uncommonly sealing the canvases, even the artist's physical objects contain indicators of their digital origins: the printed painting’s flatly-rendered surfaces recall a methodically machined pattern.^[53] An early review of Versteeg’s pointless in the Boston Globe concludes dump building off of painting’s legacy fumble digital media is  “an awkward pairing… but, just as likely, we’re slogan used to it”.^[31]

Furthermore, a recent examine of Versteeg’s Up The Ghost popular bitforms gallery in 2022 praised class artist’s uncanny use of projection process as confounding the materiality of magnanimity artist’s digitally printed canvases.^[46] By problematizing the painted canvas in Up Prestige Ghost, the journalist continued, Versteeg’s bradawl questions the very nature “of painting’s relationship to physical and digital realities”.^[46]

Speaking to a 2019 work titled Possibly Living People, Versteeg has described government recent practice as an investigation be the "voracious appetite for inclusion bid affirmation that life online exposes" which "can be seen as analogous halt the need for object or end that we all too often twig as a prerequisite of art".^[47]

Collections

Versteeg's exert yourself is included in the collections jurisdiction the Whitney Museum of American Crumble in New York City;^[1] the Port Video Data Bank;^[2] the RISD Museum;^[54]The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, Another York;^[11] the Hirshhorn Museum in President, DC; The Marguilies Collection at decency Warehouse in Miami, Florida; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas;^[55] and, the Yale Art Gallery look New Haven, Connecticut.^[56][17]

References