If there is one art world superstar from 2023 is Refik Anadol. The Turkish-American digital artist gives Ted Talks, has 770,000 Instagram followers and hosts public art shows that draw massive crowds.
On May 5, for the second year in a row, Anadol filled the streets around Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona as its spellbinding projections illuminated the building’s facade. The show, ‘Living Architecture’, which launched the city’s ‘Digital Impact’ exhibition featuring the work of 16 leading contemporary artists, drew an estimated 65,000 spectators over five evenings.
Projection mapping of “Living Architecture” by Refik Anadol. Photo: Casa Batllo.
Anadol’s artistic method is to use large data sets like a palette with which he “paints” moving digital sculptures. In the Casa Batlló project, Anadol used a dataset of approximately one billion images, including sketches by Gaudí, archives, publicly available images of the building, and photos from social media. This data was then fed into custom algorithms that integrate climate data from Barcelona to produce images projected onto the building.
An NFT piece of “Living Architecture” 2022 sold at Christie’s New York last year for $1.38 million
“We felt the true love and power of public art,” Anadol wrote on instagram“[We] honored Gaudí’s genius by using his incredible facade of Casa Batlló as his canvas, his entire life’s dataset as luminous pigment.
Last year’s show followed Anadol’s 2021 stint as artist-in-residence at Casa Batlló. During his residency, Anadol created a series of immersive rooms inside the UNESCO World Heritage building, including his Gaudí Cube which claimed to take visitors inside the mind of the most famous architect in the city.
Bringing together some of the hottest terms in the contemporary art world – AI, NFT, immersive experiences – Anadol’s aesthetically engaging and fun work has made him one of the most in-demand artists working today. Last year he staged a major work at MoMA and was recently selected as one of the artists to launch Sotheby’s NFT Secondary Marketplace.
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