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NEW YORK, N.Y. — The Hole is thrilled to announce AI Paintings, our sixth solo exhibition with British artist Matthew Stone. In his latest body of work, Stone engages with AI to pioneer the possibilities where the artist’s hand engages with new digital tools.

Two LED screens form the center of this show, displaying an unedited stream of novel AI outputs; a new painting every ten seconds. Corresponding in scale to the surrounding works on linen and functioning like smart canvases, these AI paintings transform endlessly and if you’re alone in the gallery, you will be the only person to ever see that version of the artwork.
Stone’s AI paintings—both the tangible on linen and the fleeting screenic pieces—are created through his training of a custom AI model on top of Stable Diffusion’s open source, deep learning, text-to-image model. By feeding it only his past artworks, Stone has created a self-reflexive new series of AI works that disintegrates the hegemony of the singular static masterpiece and problematizes the idea of ownership, or even what “the artwork” itself entails.

AI has become part of contemporary culture, used to solve real world problems and also create TikTok filters. It’s a tool and like a paintbrush it can be used skillfully or not. At the moment AI is throwing the art world into upheaval as artists explore its potential, galleries contend with its disruption of technique and presentation and collectors and museums feel the dissolution of authorship and ownership.

A second type of work makes its debut here, Radiating Kindness (Oil), a 3D printed, machine-assisted oil painting made in collaboration with ARTMATR labs in Red Hook, where MIT artists and engineers have come together to make innovative tools and tech. By leveraging AI, robotics, computer vision and painting scripts, their robot has created a traditional oil painting in three dimensions. You can see on the surface how the interplay between analog and digital mark making is eye-boggling.

The show also includes examples of Stone's “traditional” technique, which is anything but: on the 13-foot wide linen painting, Irradiance, four nude figures dance over piles of strewn AI paintings. The figures in the foreground, reminiscent in choreography of Henri Matisse’s Dance (La Dance), 1910, are bodacious, athletic women, heavy and sexy like a Michelangelo marble while at the same time futuristic, weightless and splendid in impossible glass and metallic brush marks. Here Stone's circular and sensitive approach is laid bare for the viewer, the references to art history, technology, culture, access and the pursuit for the intangible is almost overwhelming to grasp.

Stone’s approach points to the deeply interwoven nature of our offline and online lives today. He sees artists' use of new technologies as necessary, with creatives deploying these tools in a manner that’s not motivated by big tech or financial gains, disrupting the algorithm by creating their own and exploring this new frontier without data-driven deliverables. Creating new context and room for human subjectivities and emotion in the shift from analog to digital that arguably has already occurred.

Matthew Stone (b. 1982, London, England) is a multimedia artist whose work combines the particularities of the artist’s hand with the possibilities of digital construction. His work has been exhibited extensively both in the United States and abroad, both in galleries and at institutions, including Fiorucci Foundation (Stromboli, Italy), The National Museum of Photography, The Royal Library (Copenhagen, Denmark), Fotografiemuseum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Tate Britain (London, UK), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow, Scotland) and Jeju Museum of Art (Jeju City, South Korea). He has exhibited with The Hole since 2011. Solo shows with the gallery include Optimism as Cultural Rebellion (2011), Love Focused Like a Laser (2012), Unconditional Love (2012), NEOPHYTE (2018), Together (2020) and A Portrait of the Artist in the Metaverse (2021). He holds a BA in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts of London.

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