Ghost of the Brush
A group auction exploring the lingering presence of painting within contemporary digital practices. From digital painting to generative systems and AI, Ghost of the Brush examines how images are constructed in the digital age.
Ghost of the Brush explores how painterly thinking exists and evolves within contemporary digital art.
The auction brings together artists working across a range of digital practices — including digital painting, generative systems, artificial intelligence, and hybrid image-making processes. While their tools and methods may differ, they share a common engagement with image construction through composition, color, form, atmosphere, surface, and visual tension.
Historically, painting has been tied to the physical realities of canvas, pigment, texture, and gesture. In digital environments these material conditions are transformed into pixels, layers, algorithms, datasets, code, and computational processes. Yet many of the fundamental concerns of painting remain: how an image is built, how it occupies visual space, and how it communicates emotion, presence, and meaning.
The title Ghost of the Brush refers to the lingering presence of painting within contemporary digital practices. The physical brush may disappear, replaced by code, algorithms, neural networks, or digital interfaces, yet many of the principles historically associated with painting continue to persist. The gesture remains, the search for form remains, and the construction of the image remains. What survives is not the tool itself, but a way of seeing and shaping visual experience.
Ghost of the Brush approaches digital imagery not through the lens of technology alone, but through its relationship to the traditions and possibilities of image-making. Whether created through a stylus, a neural network, a generative system, or a combination of methods, each work reflects an artist’s attempt to construct a visual language within the conditions of the digital age.
Rather than defining painting by a specific tool or medium, the auction proposes a broader question:
What remains of painting after the image has fully entered the digital realm?
Featured Artists
Asal · bitebybit · Blanqspacer · .BLVNK · danctrl · Daria Rastunina · Ed marola · grebenshi · Heliodoro Santos · Ilya Bliznets INTROVOID · nuv · Lisanne Haack · Robinson St. George · Rustic, the · Shojiro Nakaoka · skomra · strakts · santiago · ugo_digi · Yuri Vidal Herrera · Wojak · Xu0xo · Zilian Robin · zlaserrr
Curated by Ilya Bliznets / @ilyabliznets
