What does it mean to have good taste in the age of algorithms? Who decides what’s beautiful, valuable, or worth collecting when even our desires are shaped by data? These are the questions at the core of Post-Artificial Paintings, the latest series by Israeli artist Amir Fattal.
“I want viewers to engage deeply with each image, appreciating its surface beauty while also probing the multilayered process behind it,” he says.
Known for engaging with emerging technologies, from blockchain to 3D printing, Fattal now turns to artificial intelligence as both medium and muse. The Berlin-based artist uses AI to explore the systems behind cultural aspiration: what we see as stylish, successful, or sophisticated, and who gets to define those standards in the first place.
Pictured in Dopo Domani‘s showrooms, each painting in the series features a fictional figure (a dealer, collector, or artist) set in an immaculately curated interior. The scenery depicted can be described as oil-slicked luxury: designer suits, pristine furniture, and high-concept art within the art. These aren’t real people, of course, but they could be. They represent types: avatars of confidence, class, and cultural capital, generated through prompts and keywords that mine AI’s vast visual unconscious.
“When I first encountered AI, it felt almost alchemical,” Fattal explains. “I’d enter a prompt, tweak the input, and be surprised by the result. That dynamic of steering the process while remaining open to surprise ignited my interest — not just in AI as a tool, but as a collaborator.”
For Fattal, the technology does more than generate images; it reveals the aesthetics coded into our collective data. “AI is a mirror,” he says. “It reflects what we deem ‘good taste,’ what we find desirable, and why certain forms resonate more than others.”
Instead of painting the works himself, Fattal collaborates with traditional artisans to realise the hyperrealist oil paintings — most are executed by hand via a dedicated painting workshop in China. This decision bridges conceptual art with craftsmanship, and, like the AI prompts behind each image, opens up questions about authorship. Where does the artist’s hand begin and end?
“As artists, it’s our job to reflect on these new technologies, especially when they represent the most powerful creative engine humanity has ever invented,” he says. “Generative AI opens the door to vast datasets, everything from historical archives to contemporary imagery, and invites us to interrogate how those datasets were assembled and trained.”
In Fattal’s hands, the AI-generated portrait becomes a time capsule and a reflection of today’s aesthetic codes and cultural aspirations, filtered through a machine. The result is uncanny but precise: a snapshot of the 2020s that captures not just how we want to look, but who we wish we were.
Post-Artificial Paintings was first showcased in a solo exhibition at König Galerie in Berlin earlier this year. Find out more here.
photography. Roman März
words. Gennaro Costanzo
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