I'm Not A Painter: Alexander Reben

Across a mixed media installation of wallpaper and oil painting, the exhibition displays an amalgamation of surreal imagery that feels at once familiar and remote. The latter becomes explicit with the gradual permeation of the uncanny. A feeling of uncertainty surfaces; just what are we observing? Indicative of their making, and certainly applicable to the arts in general, curiosity will often walk hand-in-hand with new frontiers.

The artworks in this exhibition are the direct result of Reben’s experimentations in human-machine collaborations at the forefront of AI technology. Using a custom neural network combined with a text generation AI (GPT-3), descriptions of non-existent artworks are generated. The artist then curates from these outputs and inputs the selected artwork descriptions into text-to-image AIs, such as DALL-E-2. The resultant images are presented alongside the AI generated artwork description. Throughout the process, Reben interjects with punctuation tweaks, curatorial choices and, ultimately, selecting the final images, of which one is chosen by the artist, a curator, or collector to be reproduced by an oil-painting artisan.

Following 2021’s impactful AI-Mazing exhibition,  I’m Not A Painter will be Reben’s second solo exhibition at Gazelli Art House, the second to be titled by an AI and, excitingly, the first to be accompanied by an AI generated Press Release. This iteration of the series will first debut in Venice as part of the ULTRAMARIN exhibition, curated by Ulrich Schrauth (Artistic Director, VRHAM!).