Agnieszka Pilat
Ahead of Agnieszka Pilat’s AI-trained robot dogs touching down for their Australian premiere as part of the NGV Triennial 2023, VAULT spoke to the multi-disciplinary Polish artist about her “romance with technology,” its role in contemporary art and why she believes the power of celebrity is transferring from human to machine.
Image credit: Basia Shows Her Creative Side with oil stick. Photo: Pilat Studios. Courtesy the artist
“As a technically trained portrait painter I thought it was important to start painting portraits of the powerful new class, which is the machine. This is where my romance with technology started,” says Agnieszka Pilat from her studio in New York.
Pilat goes on to describe the point in her career when she began to use her art practice to trace this shift in power from humans to machines, observing as the latter became the new elite social class. In this sense, she is not unlike her artistic idol Andy Warhol, who also anticipated a shift in power – from political leaders and royalty to the celebrity. Indeed, he created his most iconic portraits as a result of his intense fascination with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley emerging as the new social ruling class. If art not only acts as a mirror to society but also has the ability to forecast social and cultural change, then Pilat is certain that machine use will be inherent in the future of contemporary art.
Graduating in classical portraiture from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Pilat has always been deeply attuned to the depiction of human subjects as representative of social, cultural, artistic and religious power. But for Pilat, who moved to Silicon Valley in 2004, the pendulum has now swung. Instead of painting human faces, she has been painting portraits of robots and machines, which she describes as “nobler and more interesting.” It seems Pilat has traversed the extremes of ... Subscribe to read this article in full
