Siebren Versteeg (born August 5, 1971) is an American artist known for his painting and video works created through digital processes. His multivalent practice responds to the technology of our time and the way we consume and deploy those technologies.
Heralded by Vulture as "chaotic but illuminating", the magazine declared Versteeg the idol of "every Harry Potter-loving/Hackers-watching/anti-capitalist computer geek". Versteeg's work often relies on ready-made, online data sources for part of its media, with websites like Google, Flickr, and Wikipedia frequently collaborating with Versteeg's code. Throughout his career, Versteeg has playfully interacted with constructed identities and painterly abstraction through the use of code. Versteeg prefers to code in Lingo.
The artist is known to re-articulate familiar presentation formats and information systems popularized online, "ultimately jamming their promise of stability and ubiquity". Drawing attention to the variety of opinions, sources, conversations, and enterprises that contribute to the internet's sprawling information landscape, Versteeg's work often intervenes between mass media and its end consumer For example, the artist has been known to use recognizable brand identifiers from major companies, such as Napster and Coca-Cola, to deliver a pithy comment, or the day's headlines from the AP Newswire. In one series of the artist's algorithmically generated artworks, Versteeg instructs his code to paint over the day's front page of a credible newspaper using brushstrokes programmed to mimic an Abstract Expressionist style.
Early life and education Versteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut to Louise and Peter Versteeg. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004.
Versteeg's father built a career in fine art fabrication beginning in Los Angeles, where he cast sculptures for Tom Holland. Peter Versteeg went on to oversee projects for Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras at Lippincott, INC, an internationally renowned fabrication studio in North Haven, Connecticut. After working as a CNC programmer at United Precision in the late 1970s, Versteeg's father opened Versteeg Art Fabricators in 1989 under the name "New Haven Art Fabricators". Siebren Versteeg and his sister Emily continue to operate the family business.
Notably, Peter Versteeg oversaw the fabrication of Robert Indiana's LOVE (1970) sculpture the year before his son's birth. A year after Peter's death in 2021, Siebren Versteeg returned to the sculpture with an ephemeral artwork titled Love Live x Five (2022) Comprising the work are five computer windows stacked in the form a cross, each depicting the same livestream of Versteeg Art Fabricator's studio as they worked to restore Indiana's LOVE sculpture.
Siebren Versteeg referenced his father in earlier artworks, too. In 2005, the artist created The MP3 Collection of My Father, which was exhibited in Press Enter to Exit, Versteeg's second show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. The work allowed visitors to listen to Peter Versteeg's "MP3 collection of popular African music by navigating a PC program that also allowed users to illegally burn CDs of the recorded files".Snodgrass, Susan. 2006. "Siebren Versteeg at Rhona Hoffman and Polvo." Art in America 94 (3): 160.
Exhibitions
1999–2004 Between 1999 and 2003, Versteeg showed works through video screenings at artist-run spaces, online and at theatrical venues. During this period, Versteeg participated in www.WhitneyBiennial.Com, an online exhibit that made a guerilla art-style presentation on the back doors of 23 U-Haul trucks surrounding the museum during the 2002 Whitney Biennial Gala. The presentation intended to "expose multiple, sometimes conflicting currents, as well as extraordinary works that fall outside of any conventional aesthetic definition".
An important work from this period is Versteeg's Dynamic Ribbon Device (2003), which juxtaposes the Associated Press's live news feed with "mass-media gadgetry".Grabner, Michelle, "Six Degrees: Siebren Versteeg," ArtUS In the artwork, Coca-Cola's trademark white ribbon billows across a red background plasma screen while a scrolling script registers headline news. Shown in determination, Versteeg's debut solo presentation at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in 2005, one journalist noted that condensation droplets flowing down the scrolling graphics in the work seem to be placed "as if to add luster to this intramural media affair".
In November 2003, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago mounted a solo show for Versteeg, the artist's first solo exhibition at a major institution. Curated in the museum's 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work, Versteeg's Being Here and History unpack our perception of time by appropriating pop culture. Three scenes are depicted in Being Here (2003): a digital animation showing the artist in a waiting room; the current day and time; and, a television mounted to the wall. History confronts the viewer with a large replica of The History Channel's logo.
A year later, Katie Geha curated History and Being Here at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, an important solo exhibition in Versteeg's early career that reaffirmed the artist's presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2020, on the occasion of Versteeg's email-exhibition In20%Memory, Geha reflected on the cultural environment surrounding Versteeg's Being Here (2003):"In 2004, I showed the live computer work Being Here (2003) at the Ulrich Museum of Art. I went into the gallery every day and watched the run up to the re-election of President Bush. It was a devastating time in America...
It is no surprise during this fraught political climate [of the COVID-19 pandemic] that Versteeg has chosen to resurrect and rework this piece, which so firmly places the viewer in this excruciating moment, minute by minute. It is also telling that our belief in common truths, of maybe any belief system at all, is so thoroughly eroded in our current mediated environment.
Live news is as much a provisional memorial as anything else. Take, for instance, the CNN sign in Atlanta, covered with graffiti by Black Lives Matter protesters earlier this summer; one of the most touching works of art I've seen."Geha, Katie. 202. "Touch_In Memoriam." bitforms gallery. https://bitforms.art/pdfs/press/Touch_inMemoriam_Katie%20Geha.pdf
2005–2010 Versteeg gained representation by Rhona Hoffman Gallery by 2005, and with Max Protetch Gallery in 2007. He continued to exhibit work in group shows and several museums exhibited Versteeg's work in solo and group settings.
In 2007, Versteeg contributed to a group show at New York-based gallery Foxy Productions titled Solar Set, a reference to a boxed artwork by Joseph Cornell from 1958 in which Cornell "collected and arranged solar statistics, spherical objects, and images of the sun, among other elements, to create an idiosyncratic universe in miniature"."Solar Set." Foxy Production, 2007. https://www.foxyproduction.com/exhibitions/209/images/34705. The show received overwhelmingly positive reviews, many of which noted Versteeg's artworks as exhibition highlights. For The Satan Series, Versteeg trained a drawing program to search Google Images using the prompt "Satan" and to recreate the image results as drawings. The digitally-drawn pictures were exhibited as inkjet prints that had "a delicacy and sootiness that recall etchings".Wolin, Joseph R. "Solar Set" Time Out New York. August 2, 2007. In their review of the show, Rachel Wolff, Vulture's Art Candy Reviewer, praised "the fake Intel logo reading Satan Inside". Versteeg also created a site-specific installation composed of snapshots scraped from the photo-sharing website Flickr and neatly organized into a grid. From afar, the installation was likened to a crazy-quilt in its appearance.
In 2010, the RISD Museum mounted a show of Versteeg's work titled In Advance of Another Thing. Judith Tannenbaum, the exhibition's curator, explained how Versteeg appropriates meaning from traditional formats and images to give "them new meanings that resonate in today's world". Curated into the exhibit, Versteeg's Boom (Fresher Acconci) (2007) creates a dialogue between the artist's practice and earlier art history. Where Vito Acconci's 1976 work The Red Tapes summarizes important booms in U.S. history, Versteeg continues this practice by programming a code to display a series of Google Images to document the internet boom and the information boom.
By 2010, Versteeg joined Regina Rex, an artist-run gallery and studio space that was founded in Brooklyn, New York's Bushwick neighborhood under the name Queens County, Kings County. By 2016, the space had moved to New York City's Lower East Side neighborhood and was known as Regina Rex. The collective was made up of 10 organizing artists who shared a desire to "carve out a context that is not beholden to the social and commercial pressures of the greater art world".
Rhona Hoffman Gallery In 2003, Chicago-based Rhona Hoffman Gallery offered Siebren Versteeg's work at art fairs, including The Armory Show in New York City; Art Chicago; and, Art Basel Miami Beach.
In 2005, Rhona Hoffman Gallery first exhibited Versteeg's work in a solo show titled determination, which "ostensibly refers to the artist's search for logic and order amid the frenzy of a media-saturated, digitized world." The show was mounted as Web 2.0 began to be deployed as a structure through which netizens could construct a participatory, fluid social identity. Neither There nor There (2005) seemingly undermined the implied permanence of the show's title. The artwork depicts a dual portrait of Versteeg in his studio displayed on two adjoining LCD screens while a swarm of pixels migrate between each screen, never fully realizing a complete portrait of the artist. In reviews of determination, the artwork was noted as the ultimate crystallization of Versteeg's subversive critique of the indeterminacy and uncertainty of contemporary media structures.
Accessioned by The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., Neither There nor There appeared in an important two-part 2008 exhibition titled The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image. In his review of the exhibit for The Washington Post, Blake Gopnik observed that "there has come to be a blurring of the boundaries between fact and cinematic fiction".Gopnik, Blake. "Moving Pictures." Washington Post, The. Versteeg's work would be presented in a similar context in 2014 in The Hirshhorn's Days of Endless Time.
Subversive themes around identity, and an abundance of information continued to build towards a 2007 show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery titled Press Enter to Exit. Critic James Yood reviewed the show in ArtForum's March 2008 issue writing that its title insinuates that, "despite the heady promise of a 24/7 global community, the Internet, a proliferating labyrinth always turning in on itself, may isolate as much as it liberates." Included in the show was Versteeg's 2008 installation OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING, a monumental, thirty-four-foot-long mural with "a cell-phone-sized LCD screen bearing the Napster logo" installed in the center of the work that reads: "OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING". Versteeg extends the logo's radiating black-and-white arcs "from their minuscule source onto the wall in a megalomaniacal explosion that ends only when the wall does". Yood's review concludes that, "the promise of Napster, and of the Web in general… seems to Versteeg to be unfulfilled."
In 2011, the gallery mounted their last solo presentation of Versteeg's work Inaction. Rhona Hoffman Gallery included Versteeg's art in the gallery's retrospective 40 Years, Part 1 in 2016.
Max Protetch Gallery