Artists You Need to Know: @skygolpe SkyGolpe is an Italian artist working across painting, AI image systems, and installation. He’s self-taught; after moving to London at 18 and spending years in the street-art scene, he shifted into studio work spanning photography, painting, digital pieces, and installations. His recurring motif is the faceless silhouette, a stand-in for identity in a mixed physical–digital world. With CTRL_ABSENCE opening at our London space on 20 November, here’s a look at his path ↓

→ Background SkyGolpe’s practice combines analog surfaces and digital procedures. Paintings are scanned, reworked, printed, and iterated until the final image sits somewhere between canvas and screen. Many textures are generated digitally; others come from studio color tests. The result is a layered “desktop” logic: fragments, edits, and deliberate glitches arranged into a single surface.

→ Paint on Pixel In 2022, at Christie’s online Trespassing sale, SkyGolpe presented an NFT directly tied to a physical painting from his Paint on Pixel series, using the token as a certificate anchoring ownership across digital and physical versions. In 2024, Christie’s Hong Kong offered PX8371S, a unique NFT accompanied by a corresponding canvas. These projects position blockchain as part of the technical and conceptual stack of the work, less a marketplace add-on, more a way to connect software images, studio materials, and circulation.

→ Key Projects: Third Dimension (Foundry, Dubai, 2023–24) presented large canvases from Paint on Pixel alongside an AI photographic series, positioning the silhouette as a fractured identity built from digital and physical traces.

→ Key Projects: BLACKOUT (billboard series, starting in Milan) places short, enigmatic phrases, like SWALLOW PROGRESS and THE FUTURE IS GENERATED, on oversized billboards in Milan, a city strongly linked to visual communication and advertising. For each site, SkyGolpe collaborates with an autonomous AI system to generate accompanying visuals, turning the urban landscape into a testing ground for questions about automation, authorship, and identity in public space.

→ Key Projects: NFTS ARE DEAD (interventions, various locations in Italy, 10 January 2024 – ongoing) The phrase “NFTs are dead” appears in public space as a simple but loaded statement. Rather than rejecting NFTs, the work points to how quickly the digital art world adopts and discards formats. Announcing the “death” of something still new sets up a contradiction, like declaring a star gone just after it appears. First presented as a concept during SkyGolpe’s solo show at Foundry in Dubai, the ongoing interventions use this sentence as a prompt to look past short-term hype and ask what really changes in the relationship between images, markets, and identity.

→ Now: CTRL_ABSENCE His latest project "CTRL_ABSENCE" explores what remains when the figure is removed and only a trace, a gesture or echo, persists. Here AI doesn’t “preserve” identity; it simulates disintegration, producing a model of collapse rather than the event itself