Art Blocks × Pace Verso, Bridging the Traditional Art and Web3 Worlds

In 2022, Art Blocks and Pace Verso announced a partnership to release boundary-pushing generative NFT projects by Pace’s artists, and to hold events and sponsor content that would create a bridge between the traditional art world and the Web3 world. In the first year of the partnership, six projects were released, all by artists primarily associated with the traditional art world. In addition, both Art Blocks and Pace held events around the globe to bring their communities together, often at Pace Gallery locations. 

The partnership is a testament to Pace’s steadfast commitment to promoting advanced studio practices. It aims to be a gateway for Pace’s roster of artists to extend their creative horizon into the realm of Web3, providing them an opportunity to fully explore generative art. This is all done under the umbrella of Pace Verso, the center for all of Pace’s Web3 activities. 

Check out the exclusive articles and video content provided below, which gives comprehensive insight into projects launched by Art Blocks × Pace Verso, and further details about the partnership. 

About Pace Gallery 

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning the East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements. Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program—comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects.

About Pace Verso

Pace Verso is Pace Gallery’s hub for Web3 projects, launched in 2021 under the leadership of Pace CEO Marc Glimcher. Pace Verso works closely with artists within and beyond the gallery’s program to incubate, develop, and realize their Web3 projects, operating an NFT platform on the Ethereum blockchain at pacegallery.com/pace-verso. Pace Verso—which reflects the gallery’s long-term and ongoing support of innovative artists who have cultivated advanced studio practices engaged with boundary-pushing technologies—has presented NFT projects by Jeff Koons, Loie Hollowell, John Gerrard, Trevor Paglen, Studio DRIFT, and more. Pace Verso has also grown a robust following and is dedicated to engaging Web3 communities through discussions with artists and leaders in the crypto space. Join the conversation at #art-blocks-x-pace on Discord. 

Art Blocks × Pace Verso Partnership

Journal: Art Blocks and Pace Verso Announce a New Partnership for Digital Art

In July 2022, Pace presented a fireside chat with Marc Glimcher, CEO and President of Pace Gallery, and Erick Calderon, Founder of Art Blocks. Taking place amid artist John Gerrard’s solo exhibition with Pace, titled “Endling,” the conversation spans the origins of generative art, Glimcher and Calderon’s personal interest in generative NFTs, and Calderon’s artistic practice as “Snowfro.” They also discuss the new partnership between Pace and Art Blocks, Gerrard’s recently released NFT project Petro National, and the future of digital art and its infrastructure.

John Gerrard, Petro National

Journal: John Gerrard’s Petro National NFT Series, Explained

Launched in June 2022, Petro National addresses contemporary issues of oil consumption, and it is the first NFT project to be released as part of the partnership between Pace Verso and Art Blocks.

The Petro National NFTs feature the outlines of different countries, which are represented as glistening patches of gasoline on the world ocean. At its core, the project examines the global impact of burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and the ways that energy consumption has become a signifier of political power, explicitly addressing the disparity in oil consumption between the global north and south.

Engaging the potential of temporal and spatial media online through game engine technology, Gerrard has connected the world of WebGL with NFTs in this ground-breaking project. The artist has created a custom thin-film refraction algorithm, which reproduces the phenomenon of iridescence through the simulation of millions of rays of light broken down into a novel conceptual prismatic language.

Tara Donovan, QWERTY

Journal: Tara Donovan, QWERTY

Tara Donovan launched her first Web3 project QWERTY on Art Blocks in October, 2022. The artist is known for her expansive practice which spans sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, often explores the talismanic qualities of everyday materials and objects 

QWERTY meditates on the ways that type can function as a building block for creating patterns. Each NFT in the series depicts rhythmic, mesmeric arrangements of a single, repeating letter or symbol represented on computer keyboards. The twenty-six letters and thirty symbols that make up the layered, gridded compositions of the QWERTY NFTs are rendered in varying degrees of legibility, striking a balance between recognizability and obscurity. 

These screen-based images take on the qualities of woven textiles, and they are the result of the artist’s meticulous pattern development, organization, and refinement, which she executed through algorithmic processes.

Loie Hollowell, Contractions

Journal: Loie Hollowell, Contractions

In October 2022, Loie Hollowell debuted her first-ever NFT project, Contractions.

Hollowell’s work explores bodily landscapes through a language of dynamic, otherworldly abstraction. The artist’s semi-autobiographical paintings, drawings, and now NFTs are forged from her distinctive iconography of geometric and organic forms that represent the human body, its capabilities, and its processes. Through her practice, the artist examines her relationship to her own embodied experiences, and her works center on sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and motherhood. 

Contractions is based on Hollowell’s Split Orb sculptural paintings, a series of works she began creating following the birth of her second child. In those works, two bifurcated orbs are situated one on top of the other, with the top orb representing the artist’s brain and the lower orb signifying her pregnant belly and cervix. Hollowell’s colorful, textural Split Orb works are a meditation on the visceral experience of birth.

A.A. Murakami, Floating World Genesis

Journal: A.A. Murakami’s Floating World Genesis NFT Series, Explained

Art Blocks × Pace Verso launched the first NFT project by the Tokyo and London-based artist duo A.A. Murakami in December 2022. The first component of a multidisciplinary project by A.A. Murakami, Floating World Genesis comprises 250 unique NFTs, each depicting one of three animated scenes chronicling the origins of life on Earth: a single microbial bubble that may split in two; clusters of self-organizing bubbles that represent the growth of multicellular life; and a single bubble situated on the horizon, signifying the formation of the Earth’s biosphere. Floating World Genesis is inspired by the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953, which simulated conditions of the early Earth to explore how life first formed in the primordial oceans through self-organizing bubbles.

Opacities and diffusions of color vary among the NFTs, as do the shapes and positions of the bubbles. Clear bubbles depicted against gradation backgrounds feature refractions of light and color.

Robert Whitman, New Worlds

Journal: Robert Whitman, New Worlds

New Worlds transports viewers to otherworldly, cosmic landscapes beyond the Earth. Launched in January 2023, each of the 500 generative, interactive, and unique New Worlds NFTs centers on an imagined celestial body in space. The planets—and, in some cases, black holes—feature distinctive colors, patterns, shadows, and topographies on their surfaces, and they are situated in vast skies rendered in varying hues, opacities, and gradients. Some planets in the series are surrounded by rings, and they may have up to three moons in their orbits. Viewers can navigate around the planets and explore their sublime environments by zooming in and out and dragging their cursors on the screen. A pioneer of performance and multimedia installation art, Whitman has been producing exploratory and collaborative work for more than sixty years. He was at the vanguard of scientifically and technologically engaged art making during this period, co-founding Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a collective that supported creative partnerships between artists and engineers, in 1967.

Trevor Paglen, PRELUDES

Journal: Trevor Paglen’s PRELUDES NFT Series, Explained

Trevor Paglen’s first-ever Web3 series, PRELUDES, is one component of a multifaceted project that also includes a new “speculative reality work” including a vinyl LP record and an in-person exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York from May 12 to July 22, 2023. Paglen—whose rigorous practice spanning photography, sculpture, video, and installation often involves engineering and journalism—is known for his investigations of invisible phenomena and forces, including technological, scientific, socio-political, and historical subjects. He has spent much of his career finding and divulging secrets that are hidden in plain sight, and, with PRELUDES, the artist harnesses the peculiarities of blockchain’s underlying technology to plant secrets within his NFTs. Each of the 250 unique, generative NFTs in the interactive and experiential PRELUDES series is paired with a musical score. The sound in these NFTs is inspired by the work of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, pioneers of algorithmically generated music, as well as composers Michael Haydn, Johannes Brahms, and Olivier Messiaen, who developed systems for encoding messages into their music. Teaching the fundamentals of cryptography, PRELUDES centers on issues of subjectivity and perception.

John Gerrard, World Flag

Journal: John Gerrard World Flag

Launching in June 2023, each of the 195 World Flag NFTs depicts a different UN member’s flag amid one of four future deserts that speak to the threats of the climate crisis—these landscapes include sandy, ash, cracked mud, and gravel deserts, all of which are generated randomly and uniquely using code-based frequencies, shapes, colors, and skies. In these scenes, which are set in the distant future, the various countries’ flags represent a lost global infrastructure, and the landscapes can be understood as specters of the future, of a depleted global ecology.

As with Petro National, World Flag engages the potential of temporal and spatial media online through game engine technology, connecting the worlds of WebGL and Web3. The scenes in every World Flag artwork run on the local times of the geographic centers of their respective countries, with light conditions in the works changing throughout the year in accordance with the seasons. Night and day are also experienced in the artworks. On a spatial level, the World Flag artworks can be viewed from various orientations by dragging on the screen.