Museum Folkwang brought digital art to the museum in Rafaël Rozendaal’s monographic solo exhibition: Color, Code, Communication. In his NFT works, Rozendaal explores, among other aspects, pioneers and compositional techniques in 20th-century art. Color, Code, Communication is the first monographic NFT exhibition of the New York-based artist in a European museum.
Rafaël Rozendaal (*1980) is one of the best-known players in digital art worldwide. As early as the beginning of the 2000s, the artist conceived and distributed works in the form of websites as unique pieces. For a good three years now, Rozendaal has been realizing his art as NFTs. Non-fungible tokens are based on a technology that verifies digital art as unique in a forgery-proof list of records (blockchain). Each token has an owner, with the information and the work itself publicly available on various digital platforms. In his latest NFT projects, Rozendaal combines pictorial motifs and themes from recent art history with current forms of communication and developments in blockchain. In his artistic work, he develops a visually fascinating visual language, both for digital space and urban contexts. Museum Folkwang presented the range of the artist’s works as immersive installations, site-specific wall works, an artist’s book, in browser windows or social media as well as in public space.
A highlight of the exhibition was the walk-through presentation of 81 Horizons (2021) in the museum’s large exhibition hall. The 81-part NFT series was presented over 1,000 square metres as an immersive video installation, in which our visual experience on screens and in browser windows is juxtaposed with contemplative strolling in an exhibition situation. Rozendaal plays with the art historical topos of the horizon line – for his abstractions, he compresses two monochrome colour fields and a line each into files of around 2 KB that are permanently inscribed in the blockchain. The total filesize of the entire exhibition is under 400 KB. By bringing the NFT series into the museum space, the public was able to physically experience it.