Christie’s · Rockefeller Center, New York
Augmented Intelligence
20 February – 5 March 2025
Nine canvases from Emerging Faces by Pindar Van Arman were shown in Augmented Intelligence at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries — the first sale a major auction house has devoted entirely to art made with artificial intelligence. Thirty-four lots traced half a century of computational creativity, and the full sale was on public view in the galleries for its whole run.
- Artist
- Pindar Van Arman
- Work
- Nine canvases from Emerging Faces, 2017
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Each
- 11 × 14 in (27.9 × 35.6 cm)
- Overall
- 37 × 46 in (93.9 × 116.8 cm)
- Venue
- Christie’s Rockefeller Center, New York
- Sale
- 34 lots, 20 February – 5 March 2025
Two agents, one canvas
Emerging Faces was made in 2017, after Van Arman had spent twelve years building painting robots. He trained a neural network to recognise a human face, paired it with algorithms that judged the aesthetic properties of a canvas, and gave his robot a camera so it could watch its own strokes.
Then he set two instructions and stepped back: imagine a human face and paint it, and stop the moment you recognise one. What the canvases hold is the point at which the second agent interrupted the first — a face caught at the threshold of being legible. Forty-four were painted in all; nine of them were brought together for Christie’s.
They are among the first paintings made autonomously by neural networks, and a work from the series is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
It’s very humanistic.Sebastian Sanchez, Christie’s Manager of Digital Art
In the room
Van Arman attributes his algorithm to conversations with Harold Cohen, whom he calls a pioneer in artificial creativity — and Cohen, who began building the drawing program AARON in the 1960s, was in the same sale. The exhibition’s centrepiece was Alexander Reben’s twelve-foot painting robot, built with Matr Labs, which added to its canvas as bids climbed.
The sale was contested before it opened: an open letter signed by thousands of artists asked Christie’s to call it off, arguing that many of the models involved were trained on copyrighted work without licence. It went ahead and totalled $728,784. The Emerging Faces lot carried the highest estimate in the sale, $180,000–250,000, and did not find a buyer.
Emerging Faces ↗The series at LACMA ↗Christie’s ↗
Pindar Van Arman, nine canvases from Emerging Faces, 2017, acrylic on canvas. Shown in Augmented Intelligence, Christie’s Rockefeller Center, New York, 20 February – 5 March 2025. A curated collection on sovrn.art.