NFT
Matisse Passes Through Me v4.3
Claudia Hart, 2021
Featured In Metaglyphs

Matisse Passes Through Me v4.3

Claudia Hart’s latest project, the Digital Combines (2021) reinterprets classical memento mori, traditionally a means of contemplating the passage of time and cultural decay. In a nod to Robert Rauschenberg, Hart has appropriated the term he created for his version of “expanded painting,” that combines sculptural and painted elements together in one work. In a parallel construction, Hart merges a physical work with its digital simulation, two halves that unite the tangible and digital into a whole. Mixing a painting with an image file that also holds the Combine’s “metadata” a single conceptual work is created. Hart’s Digital Combines are an assessment of our current moment, asserting a new version of authenticity: a painting for the age of the computer. Hart’s Combines comment on the “non fungible” nature of the NFT. In what has been called a “flirtatious simulation of forgery,” She uses computer modeling to render copyright protected works by Modernist patriarchs— Picasso, Matisse, and Morandi—in a parallel symbolic space. Meticulously composed by hand, using custom software, and re-interpreted with her own attention to color, light, and surface, we understand these works as dreamlike and disembodied, intermingling the physical world with an imaginary VR game space. Each unique work is generated from a born-digital image, created with a computer-driven airbrush machine, and using archival pigments on rare hardwood panels. As appropriations themselves, these works toy with the issues of copyright that date their origins to the Modernist response to photography. The Collector Receives: 1. PNG of Matisse Passes Through Me v4.3, exhibition copy 2. JPG of Matisse Passes Through Me v4.3, optimized for web 3. TIF of Matisse Passes Through Me v4.3, archival 4. UV Pigment on acrylic white washed birch and oak (30 x 2 x 22.5”)
Token
1stDibs.1
Token ID
102
Token Standard
ERC-721
Edition
1/1
Medium
UV Pigment on acrylic stained birch and oak panel, Born-Digital Image (Variable)
Dimensions
2700 x 3600
Artwork CID: QmWnEndTNcPCQJUfih9cmZH8mQDeXVAfM66WyMQzb3P9ba/CHart-MatissePassesThroughMe-v4-3-Combine-2021.png
Token Metadata CID: QmaU4Q5B1hqEXtma9FHu1MoaBS6svJSa3B4Fvy1J97LEk9
Etherscan
Metadata
IPFS
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Claudia Hart

Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists examining issues of identity and representation. Since the late 90s when she began working with 3D animation, Hart embraced these same concepts, but now focusing on the impact of computing and simulations technologies. She was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, and later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR and objects produced by computer-driven production machines. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a Professor, she developed a pedagogic program based on her practice - Experimental 3D - the first dedicated solely to teaching simulations technologies in an art-school context. Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum. Her work has been shown at the New Museum, produced at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14, at Pioneer Works, NY, where she a technology resident in 2018, and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, UC California, Berkeley where she is currently a Fellow. . She lives in New York, is represented in the US by bitforms gallery and is married to the media artist Kurt Hentschlager.

Exhibition Notes

Matisse Passes Through Me 4.3 is presented in “Metaglyphs,” curated by Katie Peyton Hofstadter. Metaglyphs showcases artists using digital technologies to generate layers of meaning on more than one experiential plane, and includes work by Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Amy Kurzweil, Claudia Hart, LaJuné McMillian, LoVid, Carla Gannis, FakeShamus, Morehshin Allahyari, Savannah Spirit, and Swoon.

The winning bidder of this work will receive an additional physical painting (pictured above)

Metaglyph roughly translates to “beyond symbol” — an artwork representing the interconnected relationship between object materiality and digital existence. For as long as humans have told stories, we’ve been interested in objects that exist at the border between worlds. From ancient mythology to modern science fiction, our archetypal stories are filled with magical objects that serve as keys, black mirrors of culture and false identity, secret weapons with hidden powers. These NFT tokenized artworks use multiple techniques — ranging from digital simulation technology to 3D modeling to glitch — to probe the boundaries and consequences of our digital and analog desires.

The goal is not to replace reality, but to return to and enrich it. When we step through the looking glass — when we board the vessel — what will we see?

“These artworks are vessels that serve as a link between the familiar and the unknown. It’s the butterfly pinned to the board, and the butterfly rising above it. Not just the shark’s tooth, but its bite.”

–– Katie Peyton Hofstadter

Claudia Hart interviewed by Katie Peyton Hofstadter (off screen) about her Digital Combines.

History

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