Refik Anadol’s Mesmerizing Data Paintings Are Captivating Audiences Worldwide
Refik Anadol, rendering of Generative Landscapes: California, Pacific Ocean Dreams, Winds of LA, 2023. Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio.
This month, artist Refik Anadol brings the wild California landscape into one of L.A.’s premier gallery spaces. His show “Living Paintings” opens at Jeffrey Deitch on February 18th and features lush, dynamic digital canvases with brushstrokes made from data instead of oil or acrylic. Across LED screens, pixels and particles of marine and earthen hues swirl and cascade, evoking the data points regarding waves, wind patterns, and ecological formations from which they derive.
One new “painting,” for example, transforms 155 million discrete images of the Golden State’s national parks into a single, evolving composition. Anadol’s special AI algorithm stores all the information in its enormous dimensions, then “dreams” it out into the gallery space.
Over the past decade, Anadol has earned worldwide acclaim and stunning commercial success for his digital art. His concerns range from archives and architecture to the environment and the body; he’s taken data sets from museums, an airport, and the brain.
Refik Anadol, installation view of WDCH Dreams, 2019, at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2019. Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio.
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In the Deitch show, Anadol will also exhibit new “neural paintings,” which harness neuroscientific data he gathered with the aid of Dr. Adam Gazzaley, founder of UC San Francisco’s Neuroscape laboratory. They depict moments of calm, of negative and positive memory. “Every show is a new journey,” the artist said. “We’re connecting the mind and nature in this show.” It will only be complete when the audience filters in and reacts to the work.
The solo exhibition—Anadol’s first in Los Angeles—is a homecoming of sorts. The artist relocated from Istanbul to L.A. in 2012 to study at UCLA’s Design Media Arts program, where he continues to teach. He also maintains a studio in L.A., employing 15 data scientists, architects, researchers, and designers from 10 different countries. In 2018, the team undertook a major local commission, projecting data from the L.A. Philharmonic onto Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall. Anadol’s designs also decorated the Grammys stage earlier this month. The Deitch show brings his artwork back into the city at a more intimate scale.
Refik Anadol
Pacific Ocean A, 2022
bitforms gallery
Refik Anadol
Pacific Ocean B, 2022
bitforms gallery
Anadol traces the origins of this exhibition back to 2008, when he coined the term “data painting.” “In the early days, I was just trying to make the ‘invisible visible,’” he said. Numbers are all around us, via sensors and machines that communicate with each other, yet their data remains hidden. Anadol wanted to expose that kind of information. Gradually, his experiments grew more ambitious.
In 2016, Anadol became the first Artists and Machine Intelligence grantee at Google, where he and his team learned to use AI. “That was a beautiful starting point,” he said. His question became: “If a machine can learn, can it dream?” He was trying to find humanity in something non-human, and he discovered “optimism and creativity” in the process.
Anadol describes his work as “painting” with “collective memories of humanity, such as nature, space, urban culture, and time.” Such memories belong to everyone, he said, not to personal or private repositories. He and his team use digital algorithms, generated by computers, to transform data into expressive forms that tell visual stories across screens, buildings, sculptures, or immersive rooms. “You can see in my work this swirling, watery, infinitely moving, hundreds of molecules,” he said. “The molecules are a kind of pigment that never dries, because I believe that data can’t dry. Data is in flux.”
Mystery and Drama: A Captivating Landscape Painting Painting – Limited Edition of 30
Stretching Fields and Dramatic Skies show casing a Limited Color Palette Acrylic Painting. This acrylic painting on canvas captures the mystery and drama of a vast country landscape. It depicts rolling hills and fields under a cloudy sky, creating a sense of depth and scale. The painting uses bold brushstrokes and a limited color palette to create a captivating contrast between the dark sky and the light land.
Original Created: 2021
Details & Dimensions
Painting: Acrylic on Canvas
Artist Produced Limited Edition of: 30
Size: 40 W x 40 H x 0.1 D in
Frame: Not applicable
Ready to Hang: No
Packaging: Ships Rolled in a Tube
Delivery Time: Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.
Handling: Ships rolled in a tube. Artists are responsible for packaging and adhering to Saatchi Art’s packaging guidelines.
Ships From: Canada.
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Goddy, a consummate and ingenious artist of both fine and digital arts, hails from Nigeria but presently resides in Canada. His artistic journey commenced at a tender age with a passion for oil paintings. Subsequent to his graduation from medical school, Goddy’s ardent love for art continued to flourish, and he embarked on a self-taught exploration of the possibilities presented by fine art, photography, and digital art. Throughout the last few years, Goddy has dedicated his unwavering focus to refining his painting skills, while simultaneously expanding his knowledge of the intricacies of digital imaging. His oeuvre primarily revolves around landscapes and scenic photographs, with occasional forays into other areas of fine art. Goddy’s creations are often inspired by what he sees, and at times, what he interacts with.
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