Siebren Versteeg
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Siebren Versteeg (born August 5, 1971) is an American artist known for his painting and video works created through digital processes. His multivalent practice responds to the technology of our time and the way we consume and deploy those technologies. Heralded by
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as “chaotic but illuminating”, the magazine declared Versteeg the idol of “every Harry Potter-loving/Hackers-watching/anti-capitalist computer geek”.Wolff, Rachel. “The Devil inside the Internet.” Art Candy. Vulture, August 9, 2007
https://www.vulture.com/2007/08/the_devil_inside.html
/ref> Versteeg's work often relies on ready-made, online data sources for part of its media, with websites like
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,
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, and
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frequently collaborating with Versteeg’s code. Throughout his career, Versteeg has playfully interacted with constructed identities and painterly abstraction through the use of code.Kent, Charlotte. “'Email Exhibit! Yours Sincerely, Siebren Versteeg and Bitforms'.” CLOT Magazine, 2022. https://www.clotmag.com/oped/email-exhibit-yours-sincerely-siebren-versteeg-and-bitforms-by-charlotte-kent. Versteeg prefers to code in Lingo. The artist is known to re-articulate familiar presentation formats and information systems popularized online, “ultimately jamming their promise of stability and ubiquity”.Yood, James. “James Yood on Siebren Versteeg.” The online edition of Artforum International Magazine. ArtForum, March 1, 2008. https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/200803/siebren-versteeg-41878. Drawing attention to the variety of opinions, sources, conversations, and enterprises that contribute to the internet’s sprawling information landscape, Versteeg’s work often intervenes between mass media and its end consumerStaff. “The RISD Museum of Art Presents Siebren Versteeg: In Advance of Another Thing.” ArtDaily. Jose Villarreal, 2010
https://artdaily.cc/news/37676/The-RISD-Museum-of-Art-Presents-Siebren-Versteeg--In-Advance-of-Another-Thing#.Y8__5ezMLnh.
/ref> For example, the artist has been known to use recognizable brand identifiers from major companies, such as
Napster Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared ...
and
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, to deliver a pithy comment, or the day’s headlines from the AP Newswire. In one series of the artist’s algorithmically-generated artworks, Versteeg instructs his code to paint over the day’s front page of a credible newspaper using brushstrokes programmed to mimic an
Abstract Expressionist Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...
style.


Early life and education

Versteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut to Louise and Peter Versteeg. He earned his
Bachelor of Fine Arts A Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) is a standard undergraduate degree for students pursuing a professional education in the visual arts, Fine art, or performing arts. In some instances, it is also called a Bachelor of Visual Arts (BVA). Background ...
from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and his
Masters of Fine Arts A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admin ...
from the
University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus established under the Universi ...
in 2004. Versteeg’s father built a career in fine art fabrication beginning in Los Angeles, where he cast sculptures for
Tom Holland Thomas Stanley Holland (born 1 June 1996) is an English actor. The recipient of numerous accolades, including a BAFTA Award, he featured on the ''Forbes'' 30 Under 30 Europe list of 2019. Some publications have called him one of the most ...
.“About.” Versteeg Art Fabricators, LLC, 2018
https://artfabricators.com/about.
/ref> Peter Versteeg went on to oversee projects for
Robert Indiana Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark; September 13, 1928 – May 19, 2018) was an American artist associated with the pop art movement. Indiana is mostly known for his iconic image LOVE which was first created in 1964 in the form of a card. India ...
,
Claes Oldenburg Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions ...
,
Louise Nevelson Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Kyiv Oblast, ...
, and
Lucas Samaras Lucas Samaras (; September 14, 1936 – March 7, 2024) was a Greek-born American photographer, sculptor, and painter. Early life and education Samaras was born in Kastoria, Greece on September 14, 1936. He studied at Rutgers University and b ...
at Lippincott, INC, an internationally renowned fabrication studio in North Haven, Connecticut. After working as a CNC programmer at United Precision in the late 1970s, Versteeg’s father opene
Versteeg Art Fabricators
in 1989 under the name “New Haven Art Fabricators". Siebren Versteeg and his sister Emily continue to operate the family business. Notably, Peter Versteeg oversaw the fabrication of
Robert Indiana Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark; September 13, 1928 – May 19, 2018) was an American artist associated with the pop art movement. Indiana is mostly known for his iconic image LOVE which was first created in 1964 in the form of a card. India ...
’s ''LOVE'' (1970) sculpture the year before his son’s birth. A year after Peter’s death in 2021, Siebren Versteeg returned to the sculpture with an ephemeral artwork titled ''Love Live x Five'' (2022) Comprising the work are five computer windows stacked in the form a cross, each depicting the same livestream of Versteeg Art Fabricator’s studio as they worked to restore Indiana’s ''LOVE'' sculpture. Siebren Versteeg referenced his father in earlier artworks, too. In 2005, the artist created ''The MP3 Collection of My Father,'' which was exhibited in ''Press Enter to Exit,'' Versteeg’s second show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. The work allowed visitors to listen to Peter Versteeg’s “MP3 collection of popular African music by navigating a PC program that also allowed users to illegally burn CDs of the recorded files".Snodgrass, Susan. 2006. “Siebren Versteeg at Rhona Hoffman and Polvo.” Art in America 94 (3): 160.


Exhibitions


1999–2004

Between 1999 and 2003, Versteeg showed works through video screenings at artist-run spaces, online and at theatrical venues. During this period, Versteeg participated in www.WhitneyBiennial.Com, an online exhibit that made a guerilla art-style presentation on the back doors of 23
U-Haul U-Haul Holding Company is an American moving truck, trailer, and self-storage rental company (law), company, based in Phoenix, Arizona, that has been in operation since 1945. The company was founded by Leonard Shoen and Anna Mary Carty in Ridgef ...
trucks surrounding the museum during the 2002 Whitney Biennial Gala. The presentation intended to “expose multiple, sometimes conflicting currents, as well as extraordinary works that fall outside of any conventional aesthetic definition”. An important work from this period is Versteeg’s ''Dynamic Ribbon Device'' (2003), which juxtaposes the
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’s live news feed with “mass-media gadgetry”.Grabner, Michelle, "Six Degrees: Siebren Versteeg," ''ArtUS'' In the artwork,
Coca-Cola Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a cola soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. In 2013, Coke products were sold in over 200 countries and territories worldwide, with consumers drinking more than 1.8 billion company beverage servings ...
’s trademark white ribbon billows across a red background plasma screen while a scrolling script registers headline news. Shown in ''determination,'' Versteeg’s debut solo presentation at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in 2005, one journalist noted that condensation droplets flowing down the scrolling graphics in the work seem to be placed “as if to add luster to this intramural media affair”. In November 2003, the
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in the Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary ...
mounted a solo show for Versteeg, the artist’s first solo exhibition at a major institution. Curated in the museum’s ''12 x 12: New Artists/New Work'', Versteeg’s ''Being Here'' and ''History'' unpack our perception of time by appropriating pop culture. Three scenes are depicted in ''Being Here'' (2003): a digital animation showing the artist in a waiting room; the current day and time; and, a television mounted to the wall. ''History'' confronts the viewer with a large replica of
The History Channel History (formerly and commonly known as the History Channel) is an American pay television network and the flagship channel of A&E Networks, a joint venture between Hearst Communications and the General Entertainment Content division of The Wa ...
’s logo. A year later, Katie Geha curated ''History and Being Here'' at the Ulrich Museum of Art in
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, an important solo exhibition in Versteeg’s early career that reaffirmed the artist’s presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2020, on the occasion of Versteeg’s email-exhibition ''In20%Memory'', Geha reflected on the cultural environment surrounding Versteeg’s ''Being Here'' (2003):
“In 2004, I showed the live computer work ''Being Here'' (2003) at the Ulrich Museum of Art. I went into the gallery every day and watched the run up to the re-election of President Bush. It was a devastating time in America... It is no surprise during this fraught political climate f the COVID-19 pandemic">COVID-19_pandemic.html" ;"title="f the COVID-19 pandemic">f the COVID-19 pandemicthat Versteeg has chosen to resurrect and rework this piece, which so firmly places the viewer in this excruciating moment, minute by minute. It is also telling that our belief in common truths, of maybe any belief system at all, is so thoroughly eroded in our current mediated environment. Live news is as much a provisional memorial as anything else. Take, for instance, the CNN sign in Atlanta, covered with graffiti by
Black Lives Matter Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a Decentralization, decentralized political and social movement that aims to highlight racism, discrimination and Racial inequality in the United States, racial inequality experienced by black people, and to pro ...
protesters earlier this summer; one of the most touching works of art I’ve seen."


2005–2010

Versteeg gained representation by Rhona Hoffman Gallery by 2005, and with Max Protetch Gallery in 2007. He continued to exhibit work in group shows and several museums exhibited Versteeg's work in solo and group settings. In 2007, Versteeg contributed to a group show at New York-based gallery Foxy Productions titled ''Solar Set'', a reference to a boxed artwork by
Joseph Cornell Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American visual artist and filmmaker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmma ...
from 1958 in which Cornell “collected and arranged solar statistics, spherical objects, and images of the sun, among other elements, to create an idiosyncratic universe in miniature”. The show received overwhelmingly positive reviews, many of which noted Versteeg’s artworks as exhibition highlights. For ''The Satan Series,'' Versteeg trained a drawing program to search
Google Images Google Images (previously Google Image Search) is a search engine owned by Gsuite that allows users to search the World Wide Web for images. It was introduced on July 12, 2001, due to a demand for pictures of the green Versace dress of Jennif ...
using the prompt “Satan” and to recreate the image results as drawings. The digitally-drawn pictures were exhibited as inkjet prints that had “a delicacy and sootiness that recall etchings”.Wolin, Joseph R. "Solar Set" ''Time Out New York.'' August 2, 2007. In their review of the show, Rachel Wolff, Vulture’s ''Art Candy'' Reviewer, praised “the fake
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
logo reading Satan Inside”. Versteeg also created a site-specific installation composed of snapshots scraped from the photo-sharing website Flickr and neatly organized into a grid. From afar, the installation was likened to a crazy-quilt in its appearance. In 2010, the RISD Museum mounted a show of Versteeg’s work titled ''In Advance of Another Thing''.
Judith Tannenbaum Judith Tannenbaum (February 13, 1947 – December 5, 2019) was an American teaching artist and writer. Born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, she had a strong commitment to prisoners and prison issues. Tannenbaum worked in the field of communi ...
, the exhibition’s curator, explained how Versteeg appropriates meaning from traditional formats and images to give “them new meanings that resonate in today’s world”. Curated into the exhibit, Versteeg’s ''Boom (Fresher Acconci)'' (2007) creates a dialogue between the artist’s practice and earlier art history. Where
Vito Acconci Vito Acconci (, ; January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an American performance art, performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performan ...
’s 1976 work ''The Red Tapes'' summarizes important booms in U.S. history, Versteeg continues this practice by programming a code to display a series of Google Images to document the internet boom and the information boom. By 2010, Versteeg joined Regina Rex, an artist-run gallery and studio space that was founded in Brooklyn, New York’s Bushwick neighborhood under the name Queens County, Kings County. By 2016, the space had moved to New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood and was known as Regina Rex. The collective was made up of 10 organizing artists who shared a desire to “carve out a context that is not beholden to the social and commercial pressures of the greater art world”.


Rhona Hoffman Gallery

In 2003, Chicago-based Rhona Hoffman Gallery offered Siebren Versteeg’s work at art fairs, including
The Armory Show The Armory Show is an international art fair in New York City, known as New York's Art Fair. Established in 1994 as the Gramercy International Art Fair by dealers Colin De Land, Pat Hearn, Lisa Spellman, Matthew Marks and Paul Morris, the annu ...
in New York City;
Art Chicago EXPO CHICAGO is an international contemporary and modern art exhibition held each year in Chicago, Illinois. In July 2023, it was announced EXPO CHICAGO had been acquired by Frieze Art Fair. EXPO CHICAGO will be held April 24–27, 2025 at Navy ...
; and,
Art Basel Miami Beach Art Basel Miami Beach, sometimes referred to as "Art Basel Miami," is an art fair founded in 2002 as an offshoot of the flagship Art Basel fair in Switzerland. It is currently considered the most important art fair in the United States and was the f ...
. In 2005, Rhona Hoffman Gallery first exhibited Versteeg’s work in a solo show titled ''determination'', which “ostensibly refers to the artist’s search for logic and order amid the frenzy of a media-saturated, digitized world." The show was mounted as
Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, a ...
began to be deployed as a structure through which
netizen The term ''netizen'' is a portmanteau of the English words ''internet'' and ''citizen'', as in a "citizen of the net" or "net citizen". It describes a person actively involved in online communities or the Internet in general.
s could construct a participatory, fluid social identity. ''Neither There nor There'' (2005) seemingly undermined the implied permanence of the show’s title. The artwork depicts a dual
portrait A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face is always predominant. In arts, a portrait may be represented as half body and even full body. If the subject in full body better r ...
of Versteeg in his studio displayed on two adjoining LCD screens while a swarm of pixels migrate between each screen, never fully realizing a complete portrait of the artist. In reviews of ''determination,'' the artwork was noted as the ultimate crystallization of Versteeg’s subversive critique of the indeterminacy and uncertainty of contemporary media structures. Accessioned by The
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed ...
in
Washington D.C Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and Federal district of the United States, federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from ...
., ''Neither There nor There'' appeared in an important two-part 2008 exhibition titled ''The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image.'' In his review of the exhibit for
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
,
Blake Gopnik Blake Gopnik (born 1963) is an American art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of ''The Washington Post'', prior to which he was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a docto ...
observed that “there has come to be a blurring of the boundaries between fact and cinematic fiction”. Versteeg’s work would be presented in a similar context in 2014 in The Hirshhorn’s ''Days of Endless Time''.
Subversive Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the established social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and socia ...
themes around identity, and an abundance of information continued to build towards a 2007 show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery titled ''Press Enter to Exit''. Critic James Yood reviewed the show in ArtForum’s March 2008 issue writing that its title insinuates that, “despite the heady promise of a 24/7 global community, the Internet, a proliferating labyrinth always turning in on itself, may isolate as much as it liberates.” Included in the show was Versteeg's 2008 installation ''OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING,'' a monumental, thirty-four-foot-long mural with "a cell-phone-sized LCD screen bearing the Napster logo" installed in the center of the work that reads: "OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING". Versteeg extends the logo's radiating black-and-white arcs "from their minuscule source onto the wall in a megalomaniacal explosion that ends only when the wall does". Yood’s review concludes that, “the promise of
Napster Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared ...
, and of the
Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
in general… seems to Versteeg to be unfulfilled.” In 2011, the gallery mounted their last solo presentation of Versteeg’s work ''Inaction.'' Rhona Hoffman Gallery included Versteeg’s art in the gallery’s retrospective ''40 Years, Part 1'' in 2016.


Max Protetch Gallery

In 2007, Max Protetch Gallery mounted Versteeg’s first show in New York City, ''Nothing Was,'' in the gallery’s satellite space. Featured in the show, ''Something for Everyone'' (2007) is “a photographic triptych of a F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber patrolling above a sea of three hundred thousand images drawn randomly from the Internet”. The work suggests that the “daily flood of visual data, no matter how randomly generated,” is nonetheless considered by some visitors as an absolute, militant truth. Indeed, works curated into ''Nothing Was'' examined a sampling of visual information in order to reveal the Internet’s new methods of disseminating information online. The following year, Max Protetch Gallery showed ''Zero is the Center'' in its main gallery space, which received similarly positive reviews. “Siebren Versteeg’s recent show, ''Zero is Center'' tore at the heart of our mythologies,” Michelle Heinz wrote before describing how Versteeg’s digital materiality and methods transverse the phenomenological space between the gallery and the outside world.Heinz, Michelle. “Siebren Versteeg: Max Protetch.” ''Sculpture'', 28, no. 7 (September 2009): 71–72. ''Negative Shadow of a Fake Fire,'' for example, is composed of multiple parts: a waving fake flame sits between a projected light and scrim atop a crate while a video camera trained on the scrim captures its bouncing silhouette. “The choice to display the crate as part of the work takes ''Negative Shadow of a Fake Flame'' out of the context of the white cube,” Heinz argued in her review of the show. Versteeg has indicated that the work demonstrates how layers of mediation impact visual understanding. Making its debut in ''Zero is the Center,'' Versteeg’s ''New York Windows'' (2008) continuously generates a digital collage painting. The work indiscriminately sources its digital material by searching Google Images for randomly generated phrases; then, a program executes brushstrokes on top of the collaged images. The work is rendered at a high resolution: 10242 x 10242 pixels. Just as contemporary histories of painting obsess about the materiality of painted surfaces, Versteeg maintains a similarly exacting attention to the resolution of his artwork’s digital materials. Furthermore, the work is intended to be installed on a touchscreen display, so that the artwork may be precisely examined by Versteeg’s audiences.


2011 - 2020

In 2016, the
University of Michigan Museum of Art The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is one of the largest university art museums in the United States, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with . Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alu ...
held a temporary exhibition called ''Siebren Versteeg: LIKE II'', in which "a computer painting program creates a composition using a continuously changing algorithm, and then runs a periodic
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
search to find a matching image online. Every sixty seconds, the painting made by the computer is uploaded to Google’s 'search by image' feature, and images that most closely match the composition are then downloaded and displayed." Versteeg notoriously commented on the exhibit saying, “As the nature of the images presented by the work is random, the artist assumes both all and no responsibility for their presence and content”. The artwork was also exhibited in a 2016 show of ''Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents'', which was mounted by NYUAD Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi, UAE. In their curatorial notes, the organizers wrote that the work "enables us to take a critical look at our relationship with these systems of communication and trust in technology".


bitforms gallery

Versteeg participated in his first group exhibition at bitforms gallery in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood in 2013 under the title ''Vanishing Point''. The artist contributed an algorithmically painted injet on canvas work titled ''_doorformsbitman_6000x6000_323 (2×3)'' to the show. Other artists curated into ''Vanishing Point'' include
Annie Dorsen Annie Dorsen (born 1973) is an American theater director. She is the co-creator and director of the Broadway musical '' Passing Strange'', and her work in "algorithmic theater" includes the plays ''Hello Hi There'', ''A Piece of Work'', and ''Yes ...
,
Kyle McDonald Kyle McDonald is a media artist. McDonald creates visually appealing models using code, and releases tool kits for other artists to customize their own art as they see fit. McDonald was recently an adjunct professor at New York University Tisch Sc ...
, and
Mungo Thomson Mungo Thomson (born 1969) is a contemporary visual arts, visual artist based in Los Angeles.Packard, Cassie"Half-Analog, Half-Digital: Mungo Thomson by Cassie Packard,"''BOMB Magazine'', February 8, 2023. Retrieved November 26, 2024. His wide-ra ...
. The gallery also showed Versteeg’s work in a 2014 group show titled ''Distrust That Particular Flavor''; and, at NADA Art Fair in 2015, which earned a mention by
Roberta Smith Roberta Smith (born 1948) is co-chief art critic of ''The New York Times'' and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position at the Times. Education and early life Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawre ...
in
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
as not-to-be missed for its "terrific video" artworks. ''Reflections Eternal'', Versteeg’s first solo exhibition at bitforms gallery, took place in 2017''.'' Central to the show were three software programs that the artist developed: ''Today'' (2017), ''A Rose'' (2017), and ''Eye In The Sky'' (2017). In each of these works “the act of making a painting is distilled into the immeasurable potential of algorithms as well as the decision of when to make them stop”. ''Reflection Eternal'' earned strong reviews for Versteeg’s algorithmically painted canvases. In Art in America, Brian Droitcour described ''A Rose'' (2017) as constructing “variations on
Jay DeFeo Jay DeFeo (31 March 1929 – 11 November 1989) was an American visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work ''The Rose ...
’s ''The Rose'' (1958-66).” An active program running on a computer in the gallery reveals a real brush leans against a monitor as an image moves past a window on the touchscreen beneath it. “The brush is motionless, but the digital canvas is supple, and the weight and direction of the marks shift as the pressure on the brush is changing. The floating image becomes a surrogate for the artist’s hand”. Likening Versteeg’s software to "Painting’s Terminator",
Blake Gopnik Blake Gopnik (born 1963) is an American art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of ''The Washington Post'', prior to which he was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a docto ...
said Versteeg’s work takes “the piss out of the art world’s ever-renewed obsession with pigment slapped onto canvas, and its tolerance for all the cliché that come with it”. During the
Covid-19 Pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
, Versteeg presented ''In20%Memory'', an email exhibition created for bitforms gallery that media scholar Charlotte Kent described as “a charmingly irreverent approach to exhibition possibilities while also quite seriously invigorating our musings on how we might exhibit work digitally. ''Being There'' is… a return to earlier work from 2004, Versteeg updates it with a current stream of CNN Live, interspersed with him seated in a waiting room staring dully at the screen, which sometimes reflects him. Occasionally black screens with the date and time appear, an homage to On Kawara”. After the murder of
George Floyd George Perry Floyd Jr. (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020) was an African-American man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit tw ...
prompted international protests, Versteeg collaborated with Stephanie Syjuco and Jason Lazarus on ''PublicPublicAddress: A Nationwide Virtual Protest.'' The work sited a virtual protest in support of
Black Lives Matter Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a Decentralization, decentralized political and social movement that aims to highlight racism, discrimination and Racial inequality in the United States, racial inequality experienced by black people, and to pro ...
by depicting an endless stream of marching, crowdsourced images of protestors. Versteeg and his collaborators vowed to post edited images “into a moving collage of hundreds of other submissions” within 48 hours.McCulloh, Douglas, Nikolay Maslov, and Rita Sobreiro Souther. “Stephanie Syjuco, Jason Lazarus, and Siebren Versteeg - Art in the Plague Year.” ''Art In The Plague Year''. University of California Regents, Arts: California Museum of Photography, 2020. https://www.artintheplagueyear.com/Stephanie-Syjuco-Jason-Lazarus-and-Siebren-Versteeg. The artwork was curated into ''Art In the Plague Year'', a virtual exhibition in 2021.


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

In 2012, Versteeg created his work ''Daily Times (Performer),'' an important artwork that was published in
Rhizome In botany and dendrology, a rhizome ( ) is a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and Shoot (botany), shoots from its Node (botany), nodes. Rhizomes are also called creeping rootstalks or just rootstalks. Rhizomes develop from ...
's Net Art Anthology. The artist instructed his program to create an abstract painting on top of the front page of
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
’ daily print edition. After downloading the current front page, Versteeg’s “software begins to render a painterly abstraction on top of the scan, stroke by stroke, continuously developing until the next days’ edition is ready".“Daily Times (Performer).” NET ART ANTHOLOGY: Daily Times (Performer). Rhizome, 2012
https://anthology.rhizome.org/daily-times-performer.
/ref> The anthology’s critical analysis notes that the work prompts “questions of authenticity and fidelity also to painting itself: it is an uncanny, disembodied replica of the painting process, densely layered with carefully rendered brushstrokes such that it becomes impossible to locate where the distinction between this bot-made painting and an authentic work of art might lie, if anywhere at all”. The anthology’s curators note that in “reducing front-page news to purely aesthetic information and offering painterly gestures in response, the ''Daily Times (Performer)''… ointsto the inherent malleability of online information and its openness to multiple interpretations”. Attendants to an installation of ''Daily Times (Performer)'' (2012) at the
University of Denver The University of Denver (DU) is a private research university in Denver, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1864, it has an enrollment of approximately 5,700 undergraduate students and 7,200 graduate students. It is classified among "R1: D ...
report that upon arriving in the gallery, before the museum opens to the public, that “the screen has already been partially painted over”.Young, Jullian. “Daily Times (Performer).” 21st Century Digital Art, February 27, 2018. http://www.digiart21.org/art/daily-times-performer-1 . A reviewer of the installation stressed the importance of understanding Versteeg’s art on a holistic level, observing that visitors “know they’ve seen a digitally manipulated piece of news, and yet the most interesting part about that experience is that they have no idea what the world decided to care about that day, but at least they got to see a pretty piece of art”.


2021-Present

Versteeg’s work was curated into ''Jerry Gogosian’s'' ''Suggested Followers: How the Algorithm is Always Right,'' a collecting exhibit at
Sotheby’s Sotheby's ( ) is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintain ...
in October 2022 that takes its name from the tendency of Instagram to suggest followers to its users upon following an account.Helphenstein, Hilde Lynn. “Today's Paper (with Flies) , Mixed Media , Sotheby's.” Sotheby's. Sotheby's, 2022
https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/fine-art/_siebren-versteeg-todays-paper-with-flies-1ba3?locale=en.
/ref> Versteeg consigned ''Today’s Paper (with flies)'' (2019) to the exhibition, which shows a self-portrait of the artist reading a newspaper in front of 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 content stales, flies appear within the tableau with increasing frequency. In March 2023, his genesis NFT, ''For a Limited Time'', was produced in partnership with Arsnl.Art. This year long artistic experiment challenges collectors to curate the collection itself: generative artworks based on what's currently trending in our society.


bitforms gallery

bitforms gallery began representation of the artist in 2022, on the occasion of Versteeg’s second solo exhibition, mounted in 2022, ''Up The Ghost''. Playing on the technological idiom “to give up the ghost”, which refers to the moment a machine stops working. Artworks in the show “contend with apprehension and loss", a personal and cultural reference inspired by the death of the artist's father "as well as with the recent public engagements regarding digital ephemera and commodification”. Multiple algorithmically painted works in the show demonstrated how Versteeg's practice engages with painting through ultra-high-resolution images that develop slowly over time, in complex detail, rather than quickly rendering comparably less-resolved pictures. In the press text, Versteeg said the painted artworks are “generated at a level of detail that surpasses the limitations of display technology as it currently stands”. One reviewer described ''Up The Ghost'' as a collection of “images generated by algorithms or software in various possible forms and applications” where “the complexity of the ideas being executed in each work becomes evident” the longer the viewer observes and considers each work. Exhibited in ''Up The Ghost'', Versteeg's ''Possibly Living People'' (2022) demonstrates how the artist works through multiple iterations of a single, complex idea to arrive at a resolute form. Versteeg realized ''Possibly Living People'' in multiple formats between 2019-2022, although he credits Dodd Galleries as the work's initial
patron Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows on another. In the history of art, art patronage refers to the support that princes, popes, and other wealthy and influential people ...
. For example, the work also appeared in Versteeg's 2020 email exhibition ''In20%Memory'' as an image of a list of names on a standard gallery wall, foregrounded by a figure looking up at the names. The image is staged in a style that recalls pdf offer packages for contemporary artworks. In each iteration, Versteeg's work memorializes names from the Wikipedia Category Page titled
Possibly Living People Possibility is the condition or fact of being possible. Latin origins of the word hint at ability. Possibility may refer to: * Probability, the measure of the likelihood that an event will occur * Epistemic possibility, a topic in philosophy ...
, an aggregation of once-noteworthy "individuals of advanced age (over 90), for whom there has been no new documentation in the last decade". In the work's 2022 version, names from the page flash across a screen in the style of ''
Enter The Void ''Enter the Void'' is a 2009 English-language art film written and directed by Gaspar Noé and starring Nathaniel Brown (actor), Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, and Cyril Roy. A Fantasy (genre), fantasy psychological drama set in the neon-lit ...
'' (2009)'s introductory credits. Using
Open AI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...
's
Dall-E DALL-E, DALL-E 2, and DALL-E 3 (stylised DALL·E) are text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions known as Prompt engineering, ''prompts''. The first ...
, Versteeg contributed ''A Continuous Slideshow of Images Returned from Searches for
Sol LeWitt Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism. LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he pref ...
Wall Drawing Titles/Instructions'' (2022) to the gallery's
San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
show of ''Artificial Imagination''. Aligning with Versteeg's malleable practice, his work was said to have varied from its instructions: sometimes yielding "images that barely look like those of LeWitt and others that are very accurate".


Critical reception

Siebren Versteeg engages with the
history of painting The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts and artwork created by pre-historic artists, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted, tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, continents, and ...
through
digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, an ...
. The artist previously explained that his interest in painting derives from its long-standing position among art academics as a litmus test for value, quality, and importance. Included in Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, Versteeg said that “the (digital pursuit of the) paint stroke, for me, becomes indicative of an impossible quest to encode the infinite. It’s become a self-imposed methodology to try and think about the world in a phenomenological way”. Versteeg physically realizes his algorithmically-generated paintings by printing the digital compositions on canvas. Despite coding fluid paint trails into the compositions and occasionally 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. An early review of Versteeg’s work in the
Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe,'' also known locally as ''the Globe'', is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily new ...
concludes that building off of painting’s legacy with digital media is “an awkward pairing… but, just as likely, we’re not used to it”. Furthermore, a recent review of Versteeg’s ''Up The Ghost'' at bitforms gallery in 2022 praised the artist’s uncanny use of projection mapping as confounding the materiality of the artist’s digitally printed canvases. By problematizing the painted canvas in ''Up The Ghost'', the journalist continued, Versteeg’s work questions the very nature “of painting’s relationship to physical and digital realities”. Speaking to a 2019 work titled ''Possibly Living People'', Versteeg has described his recent practice as an investigation into the "voracious appetite for inclusion and affirmation that life online exposes" which "can be seen as analogous to the need for object or artifact that we all too often understand as a prerequisite of art".


Collections

Versteeg's work is included in the collections of the
Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...
in New York City; the Chicago
Video Data Bank Video Data Bank (VDB) is an international video art distribution organization and resource in the United States for videos by and about contemporary artists. Located in Chicago, Illinois, VDB was founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chic ...
; the
RISD Museum The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum) is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877. It is the 20th-largest art m ...
; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the
Hirshhorn Museum The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed ...
in Washington, DC; The Marguilies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami, Florida; the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art art gallery, museum near Water Tower Place in the Near North Side, Chicago, Near North Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is on ...
; the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas; and, the
Yale Art Gallery The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is an art museum in New Haven, Connecticut. It houses a major encyclopedic collection of art in several interconnected buildings on the campus of Yale University. Although it embraces all cultures and period ...
in New Haven, Connecticut.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Versteeg, Siebren American new media artists 1971 births Living people 21st-century American artists School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni University of Illinois Chicago alumni Artists from New Haven, Connecticut