The Gateway 2021 at Art Basel: Meet the Artists of the SuperRare Room
On Dec. 2, the product of an emerging media startup and a 255-year-old luxury art business comes to fruition. The Gateway — the collaborative effort between nft now and Christie’s — opens as an immersive, audiovisual experience inside a 23,000 square-foot financial building at Art Basel Miami. Attendees will be able to wander through the carefully curated work of many artists from all over the globe.
The OG crypto-native platform SuperRare, where art collectors can buy and sell NFTS, will host a physical room in the exhibition, a first for the digital art marketplace. Since SuperRare’s official launch on the Ethereum mainnet in April 2018, it has been a fundamental source of growth and accessibility for the proliferation of the digital art market.
The artists bringing The Gateway’s SuperRare room to life are painters, sculptors, coders, teachers, and visionaries — each with a unique lens for how stories are told, and how art gets made. Learn more about these creatives as you join us at The Gateway in exploring the dawn of a new age.
Coldie x Snoop Dogg
Coldie is an award-winning mixed-media artist whose stereoscopic 3D art has been featured in national juried art exhibitions in the United States, cryptocurrency events across the world, and a major auction house exhibition by Bonhams in London. An early crypto artist who began creating in 2017, Coldie’s blockchain-themed artwork — including the Decentral Eyes portrait series — gives a personalized visual representation of the disruptive industry. Coldie has established himself as a thought leader, collector and metaverse event curator in the NFT crypto art community.
Coldie’s collaboration with legendary hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg — DECENTRAL EYES DOGG — marks Snoop’s debut in the NFT art space. The piece will also feature a new audio track by the musician himself.
Cory Van Lew
Cory Van Lew is an NFT artist based in New York. He works with bright colors and cultivates a sense of positivity and a feel-good aesthetic to explore the everyday lives of Black Americans. In August, Cory collaborated with Mike Tyson on a limited-edition series of NFTs to celebrate the boxer’s legacy.
Hackatao
Nadia Squarci and Sergio Scarlet formed as the artistic duo Hackatao in 2007, their name stemming from “hack” — for the pleasure of going under the skin and discovering what lies beneath — and “tao,” for yin and yang, their dynamic balance. In 2018, they minted their artwork Girl Next Door, and contributed significantly to the implementation of royalties for artists in the digital market. They reside in the mountains outside of Milan.
Helena Sarin
Helena Sarin is a visual artist and software engineer. Art and software ran as parallel tracks in her life; all of her art was analog until she discovered GANs (generative adversarial networks). As part of her postGANism approach, she explores how AI can be used as a tool to create physical artifacts.
Sarin is also the founder of the Neural Bricolage Studio, which aims to demystify, promote, and display AI assisted artwork.
JENISU
JENISU is a crypto pop artist based in Tokyo. She reimagines themes of technology, fashion, nature, retro aesthetics, and still life objects through bold, vivid colors. In 2019, Snapchat commissioned JENISU to create 69 unique stickers still shown to global users today.
Matt Kane
Matt Kane is a Chicago-born artist and self-taught programmer prominently active in the crypto-art and NFT scene. He has been an artist for more than 20 years, beginning with traditional oil painting and later teaching himself to code in order to better actualize his artistic visions.
Kane’s advocacy for the rights of artists to participate in their own success led to a minimum secondary-sale royalty standard for artists across the NFT industry in early 2020. He ended that year as the winner of Enjin’s Most Innovative NFT award, and started 2021 listed among the Top 100 Notable People in Blockchain by Cointelegraph.
In the past year, his work has been featured at exhibitions in New York, Miami, Rome, Milan, Beijing, Nanjing, London, and Hong Kong. In October, Kane premiered The Door as the first custom series smart contract on SuperRare. Through the custom art studio software he designed, Kane leverages generative algorithms to produce vibrant, richly detailed, and multilayered visions addressing varied themes. In his words, he is “exploring historical aesthetics with code, doing with geometry what the great painters did with oils.”
Other World
Other World mixes collages and illustrations to create surreal and psychedelic stories. He is also a Ph.D. student studying biological sciences. His extensive involvement in science has influenced his world views and outlook on life, which strongly impact the art he creates. Blending the old, traditional renaissance-era art with new world topics and popping colors, Other World tells the inevitable stories of mankind.
Ross Ulbricht
Ross Ulbricht is an entrepreneur who created the now-defunct Silk Road online marketplace. Ross was arrested in 2013 for operating what the FBI called a “criminal marketplace,” and is currently in prison serving a double life sentence plus 40 years; he is ineligible for parole. Ulbricht’s first NFT collection will be auctioned at Art Basel as part of the ongoing effort to petition for his freedom, and to contribute to Art4giving.
Sarah Zucker
Sarah Zucker is an L.A.-based artist whose work merges the gorgeous and grotesque through humor, psychedelia, mysticism, and the interplay of cutting edge and obsolete technologies. She has been in crypto art since early 2019, and her work was part of the landmark NFT auctions Natively Digital at Sotheby’s, and CryptOGs: The Pioneers of NFT Art from Bonhams and SuperRare. On Giphy, her GIF art has been viewed more than 6.7 billion times.
Fun fact: Zucker is also a 2013 Jeopardy! champion.
Check out Zucker’s nft now podcast episode about being a crypto art OG.
XCOPY
XCOPY is a London-based artist, and one of the earliest adopters of the crypto art space. His work explores themes of death and dystopia through animation and distorted visual loops. In March, XCOPY broke the all-time sales record for SuperRare when his work Death Dip sold for $1.73 million. He has since smashed that with the late September sale of Some Asshole, which sold for $3.86 million.