Generative Art
"Generative art is art made using a predetermined system that often includes an element of chance – is usually applied to computer based art"
The practice has its roots in dada, yet it was the pioneering artist Harold Cohen who was considered one of the first practitioners of generative art when he used computer-controlled robots to generate paintings in the late 1960s. More recently the Turner Prize winner Keith Tysonbuilt an ArtMachine, a complex recursive system that generated detailed propositions for artworks for Tyson to make.
The term generative art is predominantly used in reference to a certain kind of art made on the net, particularly because artists devise programs that can be accessed and controlled by the public. Generative art is also associated with process art
Issy Wilson
https://www.instagram.com/iwilson.art/?hl=en
Issy Wilson is a London-based artist originally from Chicago. Her practice is deeply rooted in the natural world, with a focus on drawing, painting, textiles, and research. She gathers inspiration by observing her surroundings from the seemingly mundane to the extraordinary: noticing water stains on pavement and moss in the cracks of city bricks to the breathtaking views of the national parks and ancient forests.
Her work explores the structures of roots, trees, mycelium, lichen, and mosses, examining how they mirror blood vessels, neurons, rivers, and mountains in their search to form strong organic connections. Her art studio has become an ecosystem of its own, with pieces evolving symbiotically.
Materials: ink, tea, emulsion, cheese cloth, acrylic, pea, canvas, pastels.
Ecdysis
ink, tea, and emulsion on canvas, 186x300cm, 2024
Ecdysis detail
Limestone I
ink and emulsion on canvas, 150x250cm, 2024
Limestone II,
ink and emulsion on canvas, 150x150cm, 2024
Christopher Wool
Christopher Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases, but he possesses a wide range of styles; using a combined array of painterly techniques, including spray painting, hand painting, and screen-printing, he provides tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. By painting layer upon layer of whites and off-whites over screen-printed elements used in previous works—monochrome forms taken from reproductions, enlargements of details of photographs, screens, and Polaroids of his own paintings—he accretes the surface of his pressurized paintings while apparently voiding their very substance. Only ghosts and impediments to the field of vision remain, each fixed in its individual temporality. Through these various procedures of application and cancellation, Wool obscures the liminal traces of previous elements, putting reproduction and negation to generative use in forming a new chapter in contemporary painting. His paintings can therefore be defined as much by what they are not and what they hold back as what they are.
Wool has forged an agile, highly focused practice that incorporates a variety of processes and mediums, paying special attention to the complexities of painting.
Untitled, 2012
Silkscreen ink on linen 120 by 96 inches
...Stupid Rabbit, 2004
enamel on linen 96by 72 inches
Give it Up or Turn It Loose, 1994
Enamel on aluminium 78 by 60 inches
A central tenet of Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) practice is the very process of painting itself. This has been explored and developed since his early years through reducing form and colour, as well as experimenting with different painting styles and reproduction techniques, such as silkscreen or pattern rollers, overlaying and erasing, covering or obscuring with paint, and adding layers on top. The range of techniques Wool has used over the years makes reference to the processes and gestures that have marked contemporary art history. The artist’s complex work encourages the viewer to reflect on the physical qualities of paint and various modes of reproduction, while honing an awareness of painting procedures and the essential elements of the medium: colour, form and line.
‘Christopher Wool’s paintings seem to capture visual urban experience, carved out of a moment for the duration of an artwork – an artwork that coverts the structures of experience into the structures of painting. Non-specific moments and impressions are lifted out of context and fixed into details of a painting that, unlike graffiti, conveys the speed and concentration of its origin only when it is contemplated over a measure of time in an art space. The dynamic of the picture’s conception becomes, very gradually, the dynamite of the thought it contains. Thought pictures.’
Christopher Wool’s paintings and prints explore the confluence of image, text, and pattern. They often feature enigmatic, confrontational found phrases or illegible scribbles, which are either stencilled or plastered in black across flat white fields. The artist occasionally covers the compositions with spray-paint marks and screen-printed elements (some taken from his previous works), erasing and relayering as he goes. His process—which focuses on the possibilities of reproduction, appropriation, and accretion—is as important as the results themselves. Wool studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the New York Studio School. New York’s vibrant 1970s downtown No Wave and punk scenes became major influences, and Wool reached his mature style in the mid-1980s. Wool has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, and beyond, and his work belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. His work has achieved eight figures on the secondary market.
Untitled 1988
Enamel and flash on aluminium 96 by 72
Yahoo Hortal
https://yagohortal.com/
Most artists actually think in terms of light and dark, and not so much color. But, Yago, you’re a colorist too" Peter Halley
Yago Hortal (Barcelona, 1983), studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and the University of Seville. In 2007, one year after graduating, he wins the 49th Prize for Young Painters. The following year, at only 25 years of age, he began to exhibit not only in Spain but also in the rest of Europe and the United States. His paintings maintain a tight relationship between the work of art and action painting itself. The canvas forms part of a performance in which the artist consciously creates spontaneous color forms in an infinite gamma, expressing passion and vibrancy. The painting seems to come out of the canvas, causing a desire to touch it and creating textural sensations.
Yago Hortal paints in vivid, sometimes fluorescent acrylics, smearing, marbling, and splattering the material in thick, abstract brushstrokes onto large-scale white canvases that pop with color. Hortal works on several paintings simultaneously, responding to the colors both impulsively and with premeditation, and often letting the paint drip down the canvas.
“I look for a balance between chaos and order,” he has said, “something like a combination between a chess game and a boxing match.”
Z85, 2024
Acrylic on linen23
3/5 × 19 7/10 in | 60 × 50 cm
Giant, sweeping waves and splashes of thick paint flood our souls in vibrant colour. Inspired by Abstract Expressionism, the art of Yago Hortal has a direct connection with the viewer, creating sensations that balance between chaos and order. The contemporary artist paints with spontaneous yet also planned action. Brushstrokes that smear, marble, and splatter, recreate the face and personality of colour in our contemporary age.
Yago Hortal was born and raised in the city of Barcelona. He uses industrial colors and materials that reference an urban experience. Within his studio, he listens to different music genres that mould his emotional state before painting. As energy flows onto the canvas, it is captured and preserved as a physical signature.
“What matters to me is that the rhythm of each brushstroke can be reflected in a single gesture…each brushstroke acting as a reflection of the moment it was made. That’s why all my paintings are also a kind of personal diary.” - Yago Hortal
characterized by its intense and vibrant chromaticism.
“ I am known for very gestural artwork, very liquid, with a very marked gesture, very clear, as well as a very thick density and exuberant color.”
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“I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do.”
- Helen Frankenthaler.
For over forty years, Bernard Frize has examined what it means to make a painting. Working in series, he has developed diverse protocols in order to undermine his own creative role and thus free his compositions of self-expression. For Frize, paint, resin, brush and canvas are not materials to be mastered, but collaborators with whom he enters into a working relationship. The terms of this partnership may vary from series to series, but ever-constant is the notion that the media itself is equally as important as the hand of the artist in determining the look and feel of a final painting. Subtle in some works and significant in others, the drips, pools, swirls, and blobs of paint found throughout Frize’s large colorful abstractions evidence his anti-auteur relationship to painting. Preferring to raise questions rather than provide answers, Frize invites viewers to consider the implications of process and materials (what is painting) on form and content (what is a painting).
Acrylic and resin on canvas
150 x 130 cm | 59 1/16 x 51 3/16 inch
Unique
Bernard Frize’s paintings are neither narrative nor mutilated, but they owe their creation, in large part, to a kind of sanctioned degeneration. Unruly paint has been allowed to bleed over the artist’s own brushwork, complicating systematic strokes with smudges, swathes and stains whose amorphous hazy forms that suggest various celestial bodies. Managing to appear simultaneously vibrant and on the brink of ruin, the canvas reflects Frize’s complex and ever-evolving relationship to paint, the act of painting and what it means to be a painter.
Alice Baber (American, 1928-1982), The Light Inside the Mountain, 1978. Oil on canvas, 32 7/8 x 55 in.
1. letters to felice, frank kafka | 2. strangers, ethel cain | 3. overture (1992), helen frankenthaler | 4. desperation sits heavy on my tongue, a.m | 5. against the loveless world: a novel, susan abulhawa | 6. a green thought in a green scale (1981), helen frankenthaler | 7. wife, mitski | 8. ruth 1:16 | 9. lush spring (1975), helen frankenthaler | 10. no exit, jean-paul sartre
Muriel Napoli
Nature 391 painting
Acrylic on Canvas 100 by 140 cm
Nature 377 Painting
Acrylic on canvas 160 by 100 cm
Nature 362 painting
Acrylic on canvas 80 by 80 cm
My paintings are a tribute to nature's unwavering spirit of transformation, untouched by human intervention, from the dawn of time to the present day. The mighty oceans and their formation, the arrival of life-sustaining water, the laying down of sediment, the fiery fury of magma, the creation of coal, the birth of celestial bodies, accretion, geological wonders...these are but a few of the subjects I seek to illuminate. Through the harmonious blending of organic and mineral elements, I strive to evoke nature's symphony of change. In my art, I aspire to strip away all that is artificial, the vestiges of human tampering, and present a celestial vision of the natural world, pure and unblemished.
Artist Statement What is found in my pictures is nature's ability to change independently of the action of humanity, from its origins to today. The formation of the oceans, the origin of water on Earth, sedimentation, fire, magma, formation of coal, of planets, accretion, geological phenomenon ...I mix organic, mineral, the elements and various displays of these elements. I eliminate, as much as possible, everything that humanity has added to the world, all the changes introduced, everything which is artificial. My work tends to connect the world to beings and things, to form a whole, an entirety.
Muriel Napoli is a talented French painter whose works have been exhibited in USA, Italy and France. Seeking to remove elements of pure superficiality or attractiveness, she creates impactful abstract works marked by a unique colour combination, sweeping shapes and a striking sense of space.
What is found in the paintings of Muriel Napoli is the capacity that the nature of transforming independently of the action of man, from origin to the present. Formation of oceans, origin of water on earth, sedimentation, fire, magma, coal formation, planets, accretion, geological phenomena ... "I mix the plant, the mineral, the elements and the different manifestations of these elements. I make the most of everything that man added to the world, all the transformations brought by him, which is artificial. My work tends to link the universe to beings and things, to form a whole, a whole. "
lyrical abstraction
Passing on her emotions, feelings, transitional ideas that materialize on canvas through flat tints of the material, oil, knife directly positioned on the floor, on the frame, without any reference to reality itself.
"My ambition is to lead the viewer to think, to meditate, perhaps to dream"
Installation view 2021
Muriel Napoli, an abstract painter with a passion for the beauty of nature, recently embarked on a remarkable artistic adventure in Vietnam. During her one-month artist residency program in Ho Chi Minh City, she was captivated by the astonishing richness of Vietnamese nature. Today, we invite you to join us on a three-minute artistic exploration with Muriel as she shares her techniques and the deep inspiration she drew from this awe-inspiring environment.
Muriel’s artistic process is a harmonious blend of instinct and technique. She meticulously selects her materials, ensuring they can capture the essence of the natural world she seeks to convey on her canvas. With a palette of fluid and vibrant colors, she sets out to create a visual symphony that celebrates the simplicity and beauty of the Vietnamese landscape.
Muriel’s dedication to capturing the essence of nature goes beyond the visual realm. She strives to infuse her paintings with the very essence of the flowers, fruits, and vegetation that so inspired her. Through texture, layering, and the interplay of light and shadow, Muriel breathes life into her art, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the beauty and serenity of the natural world.
Nature 326
to create energetic ridges and furrows of pigment that can be read as extreme close-ups of a painterly brushstroke, drawing attention to the action and materiality of painting itself. His works are structurally varied, ranging from a thin glaze through which the metal ground gleams to sculptural reliefs with overlapping ridges and furrows. In the context of Martin's notion that landscape painting and abstraction are intertwined, his work becomes an imaginary space, a mental landscape, an abstracted and mesmeric focal point for contemplation.
Works on paper allow the artist to experiment with movement and colour before turning to larger-scale formats in oil. The fluidity of the cold process dye he employs enables him to explore the interaction between pigments, as he lets himself be guided by the merging tints of emerald green and ultramarine blue, yellow and ruby red.
Using gestural brushstrokes or stains across the medium, Benvenuto focuses on line and detail to build a narration of the life around her. She draws back to significant events, the people she’s met, or the changing landscape. Fundamentally, the artist surprises herself every day, shocking herself with what’s not familiar. From the changing seasons to the sweeping ocean — she is ever surrounded by inspiration, in awe of its beauty.
Benvenuto found her calling within abstract works, focusing on what cannot be represented. In her artworks, the artist wants to explore and create new imagery to navigate the current world. Working from the mind, using memories to shape her composition, Benvenuto connects with her audience through visual representation; a soft curve becoming a wave, or gestural mark-making turning into long grass dancing in the wind.
Her works narrate an exploration of textile, material and technique, probing the viewer to move closer to the works, at times leaving the linen raw inviting an organic aesthetic. Geometric shapes, sharp lines, or paint gestures activate the viewer’s eye in an array of multi-colour.
What would you like people to notice in your artwork?
Ultimately, I wish for my artwork to spark conversations and introspection. Whether it's the boldness of colors, the rhythm of lines, or the unexpected combinations in my sculptures, I hope my creations leave a lasting impression that lingers in the hearts and minds of those who encounter them. By capturing attention and evoking emotions, I aim to create a bridge between my inner artistic world and the diverse experiences of my audience. The interplay of vibrant colors and intricate forms is meant to prompt viewers to explore their own interpretations and connect with the stories I'm weaving through each piece. I hope that as people engage with my art, they find moments of reflection.