Refik Anadol’s Mesmerizing Data Paintings Are Captivating Audiences Worldwide

This month, artist Refik Anadol brings the wild California landscape into one of L.A.’s premier gallery spaces. His show “Living Paintings” opens at Jeffrey Deitch on February 18th and features lush, dynamic digital canvases with brushstrokes made from data instead of oil or acrylic. Across LED screens, pixels and particles of marine and earthen hues swirl and cascade, evoking the data points regarding waves, wind patterns, and ecological formations from which they derive.

One new “painting,” for example, transforms 155 million discrete images of the Golden State’s national parks into a single, evolving composition. Anadol’s special AI algorithm stores all the information in its enormous dimensions, then “dreams” it out into the gallery space.

Over the past decade, Anadol has earned worldwide acclaim and stunning commercial success for his digital art. His concerns range from archives and architecture to the environment and the body; he’s taken data sets from museums, an airport, and the brain.

In the Deitch show, Anadol will also exhibit new “neural paintings,” which harness neuroscientific data he gathered with the aid of Dr. Adam Gazzaley, founder of UC San Francisco’s Neuroscape laboratory. They depict moments of calm, of negative and positive memory. “Every show is a new journey,” the artist said. “We’re connecting the mind and nature in this show.” It will only be complete when the audience filters in and reacts to the work.

The solo exhibition—Anadol’s first in Los Angeles—is a homecoming of sorts. The artist relocated from Istanbul to L.A. in 2012 to study at UCLA’s Design Media Arts program, where he continues to teach. He also maintains a studio in L.A., employing 15 data scientists, architects, researchers, and designers from 10 different countries. In 2018, the team undertook a major local commission, projecting data from the L.A. Philharmonic onto Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall. Anadol’s designs also decorated the Grammys stage earlier this month. The Deitch show brings his artwork back into the city at a more intimate scale.

Anadol traces the origins of this exhibition back to 2008, when he coined the term “data painting.” “In the early days, I was just trying to make the ‘invisible visible,’” he said. Numbers are all around us, via sensors and machines that communicate with each other, yet their data remains hidden. Anadol wanted to expose that kind of information. Gradually, his experiments grew more ambitious.

In 2016, Anadol became the first Artists and Machine Intelligence grantee at Google, where he and his team learned to use AI. “That was a beautiful starting point,” he said. His question became: “If a machine can learn, can it dream?” He was trying to find humanity in something non-human, and he discovered “optimism and creativity” in the process.

Anadol describes his work as “painting” with “collective memories of humanity, such as nature, space, urban culture, and time.” Such memories belong to everyone, he said, not to personal or private repositories. He and his team use digital algorithms, generated by computers, to transform data into expressive forms that tell visual stories across screens, buildings, sculptures, or immersive rooms. “You can see in my work this swirling, watery, infinitely moving, hundreds of molecules,” he said. “The molecules are a kind of pigment that never dries, because I believe that data can’t dry. Data is in flux.”

Anadol’s art swiftly caught both market and curatorial attention. The artist earned over $5 million from NFT sales in 2021 and made news last May, when his digital work Living Architecture: Casa Batlló sold for $1.38 million at Christie’s.

Michelle Kuo, the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, first heard about Anadol’s work via media artist and scholar Casey Reas. “There are very few artists working at the bleeding edge of data science, deep learning, and blockchain technologies—and Refik is actually changing each of these fields,” Kuo said. She admires how Anadol and his studio understand the possible pitfalls of these sectors, yet “instead of rejecting or simply decrying these technologies, he refuses to accept them as they are given.”

Kuo and senior curator Paola Antonelli invited Anadol to explore MoMA’s archives and execute a project at the institution. Last November, Anadol unveiled “Unsupervised,” a series of three new data paintings that extend 24 feet by 24 feet, floor to ceiling, in MoMA’s ground-floor lobby. “We thought his experimental approach to MoMA’s histories, to the Museum’s archives, would lead to something utterly new and transformative—and, to my mind, it did,” Kuo said.

The works attempt to “dream” up new possibilities for MoMA’s collection. “You see a wild, singular, strange, fascinating dance between human will and machine will, unfolding in real time, as the machine learning model they’ve created learns about our archives of modern art,” Kuo said. The appearance is characteristically fluid, yet rooted in data about very real, precious objects.

Kuo admires how “Unsupervised” helps audiences “perceive otherwise imperceptible complexity” as it “changes our understanding of the endlessly forking paths and nonlinear histories of modern art,” and “involves the real-time conditions of the space itself—movement, light, weather—to create a public work, evolving in tandem with the people around it.”

Kuo noted that Anadol’s presentation has connected with a digital art audience that may not otherwise visit the institution. Attendance has been high, with visitors “totally absorbed” in their watching. “It’s said that the average amount of time that a viewer spends in front of a work in a museum is about 20 seconds,” Kuo said. “People linger and stay with ‘Unsupervised’ for hours.”

If the MoMA and Deitch shows give Anadol a firm coastal presence, his next project is taking him far from Midtown Manhattan and La Brea. He recently traveled into the Amazon, meeting with the Indigenous Yawanawá tribe to discuss how he can help them preserve their own language and data, as they help him gather his own. “We need their wisdom to understand life in the forest and the meaning of the forest,” Anadol said. Over the next year, he’ll translate data from all the world’s rainforests into new artworks, then display them at a brand-new experiential space he plans to open in L.A.