Exhibition information
Deji Art Museum is thrilled to announce the opening of the first-ever solo museum exhibition of internationally renowned contemporary digital artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), titled Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future. The exhibition will debut on Thursday, 14 November 2024. In collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Senior Artistic Advisor, Deji Art Museum presents a comprehensive and systematic retrospective of Beeple’s creative career. Audiences are invited to immerse themselves in exploring multiple dimensions of Beeple’s artistic practice, gaining insight into his critical inquiries and profound impact on the development of digital art and contemporary art history.
This will be Beeple’s largest solo exhibition to date, featuring some of his most iconic works, including Everydays, Human One, S.2122, as well as new pieces created specifically for the exhibition. In addition, the Museum will showcase a special section and display project dedicated to discovering and nurturing emerging digital artists, alongside a series of panel discussions and public programs.
Hans Ulrich Obrist says, “Globally recognised with the worlds of art, music and technology through his experimentations with new media and NFTs, Beeple synthesises these different fields. Tales from a Synthetic Future will reveal the different dimension of his practice.
Conceived as a collision between the past, present and future frames of reality, the immersive exhibition will demonstrate Beeple’s cross-disciplinary approach by telling the story of how his practice developed in the early 2000s with the inception of his Everydays series – from hand-drawn images to digitally rendered paintings – through to his recent kinetic artworks: living organisms comprising digital video and three-dimensional sculpture. The exhibition will also provide a unique insight into the artist’s processes over the years by recreating elements from his studio in Charleston, North Carolina, together with several early projects encountered via the computer technologies, or ‘digital archaeologies’ with which the artist began his practice.
Presented as a linear chronology, this survey exhibition will demonstrate the different temporalities that coexist within Beeple’s expansive output, and how low-tech or analogue modes of creation, such as drawing and doodling, continue to serve as important foundations within his visionary digital practice.
Artist
Beeple is the professional name used by Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist and designer whose work incorporates references to contemporary politics, pop culture, and science fiction. Often irreverent and sardonic in tone, Beeple’s artistic production responds to the news and internet culture, metabolizing images and stories in real time. Beeple gained prominence for his ongoing work Everydays: The First 5000 Days, initiated in 2007, wherein the artist creates a unique image and uploads it to his website daily. His sculptured work evokes distinctive realms that find echo in worlds from the Hellenistic to the cybernated. By paying homage to the rich history of digital art and reflecting on the future of humanity and media, he challenges the fantasies surrounding emerging technologies, expanding the blurred boundaries between digital and physical existence.
Senior Artistic Advisor
Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. He also worked as a curator for Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021), Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021), James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023), Remember to Dream (2023), Une vie in Progress (2023).