Inside a Mayfair gallery earlier this week, a gathering of London’s cognoscenti raised colorful textured glasses along a well-appointed table stretching the length of the room. Glamorous as it was, the scene was a typical enough art world gallery dinner, except for the fact that the usual attendees, who included magazine critics and an art historian from the Courtauld gallery, were toasting an artist whose star ascended during NFT mania, and they were clinking glasses across the table with people named things like “blockbird” and “shamrock.”

It was at Unit London, where generative artist Tyler Hobbs was inaugurating his first solo exhibition in the U.K. On view through April 6, “Mechanical Hand” includes three paintings on canvas, and 17 works on paper. Real canvas and real paper, that is.

Hobbs became a sensation during the NFT bubble in 2021, best known for his highly sought-after “Fidenza” NFTs—a series of 999 algorithmically produced and randomized grids of color. In 2023, he remains a breakout as his market is one of few that appears to have survived the crypto crash. One of these pieces hammered down at Christie’s evening sale in London last week at £290,000 ($348,667).

But the focus of the evening was definitely on IRL art. The artist, who studied computer science at university, made the works on view using algorithms, codes, and plotters—a sort of robotic arm directed by a computer—to create aesthetic compositions, which he then embellished by hand, either painting or drawing on the surface.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.