WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, Splunk C.E.O. Gary Steele, and Jack Shear, Ellsworth Kelly’s widower, all mingled on November 2 at Nino Mier Gallery, in SoHo, for “Error Signals,” Asher Liftin’s first solo show in New York. It sold out before it opened. With the show, the art world’s newest talent is no longer a secret kept by the big-name collectors who have purchased his work, including David Geffen.
At just 24, Liftin also has work on view with paintings by established artists—from Dana Schutz and George Condo to Kara Walker—in a group exhibition at Venus Over Manhattan, in NoHo. “Retinal Hysteria,” up through January 13, was organized by Robert Storr, the former dean of the Yale University School of Art and Liftin’s freshman year professor.
Liftin graduated from Yale in 2021 with a double major in art and cognitive science. He’s Nino Mier’s youngest artist, and his work, large-scale paintings depicting classical themes—a Vermeer-like still life, a Mannerist-inspired triptych—are freshly modern.
“I didn’t want to make an oil painting of technology,” Liftin tells me. “I’m not interested in the irony which comes with using an art language to describe a technological language.” Instead, he created something entirely new to answer the question “How do you represent technology outside of a computer?”
First, Liftin uses iPhone photos, movie stills, and A.I.-generated images to make digital compositions. He works as a printer would, reconstructing RGB bits (the colors we see when we look at a screen) into CMYK bits, the color module that a printer uses to translate an online image into something physical, to create his images. He layers one grid of dots on top of the next. “I’m totally giving myself carpel tunnel,” he says, laughing. One of his larger paintings is made of 400,000 dots.
Liftin, the son of an architect and an English teacher, grew up in Tribeca and spent weekends going to galleries and museums. He became interested in drawing in fourth grade, when he started spending lunch breaks in the art room of his Brooklyn prep school, Saint Ann’s School. A discerning teacher took note of Liftin’s talent. The teacher happened to be friends with someone working on Wes Anderson’s then upcoming film, Moonrise Kingdom, who was looking for a young artist to make paintings for the movie.
“I had no idea who Wes Anderson was,” Liftin says, “but I went home and did three watercolors.” He got the job.
At 12 years old, he met a graffiti artist on the street who “started bringing me to art openings,” Liftin says. “I would bring my sketchbook and show people what I was doing.” He also began selling hand-painted shoes on Facebook. By the end of high school, he’d landed an internship at R13 Denim, during which he drew on blazers and white denim jeans. Wiz Khalifa wore the pants onstage during his 2017 Coachella performance. “There is a photo of him backstage, shirtless, smoking a joint in a pair of my jeans,” Liftin proudly tells me.
When he got to Yale, Liftin wasn’t so sure what he was going to do with his life. “I didn’t want to be an artist, but I was looking for something that felt like I could use my creative drive.” Even though he took art classes throughout college, Liftin didn’t think he could support himself as a painter.
Then, during the pandemic, Liftin stayed in New Haven and turned his grimy college house, where he lived with five friends, into a studio and began painting every day. He started to apply the rules he was using for his cognitive-science thesis to his art. “Rigid structure is also highly creative,” he says.
“I started developing a sort of visual language that could encompass the discrepancy between the painting and the thing it represents,” explains Liftin. “The digital space is exciting for me because it represents this new language system for constructing anything.”
“Error Signals” is on at Nino Mier Gallery, in New York City, through December 16
“Retinal Hysteria” is on at Venus Over Manhattan, in New York City, through January 13, 2024
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Clara Molot is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL