Royal portrait painter Jonathan Yeo has taken on a new challenge – painting the portrait of a man who does not exist.
The artist, whose fiery red image of King Charles hit the headlines recently, is one of a group of painters using artificial intelligence to create new work for a unique exhibition.
The show is the idea of husband and wife duo Rob and Nick Carter who used the website This Person Does Not Exist to generate life-like facial images of non-existent people which were then passed to the artists to be used as inspiration.
Yeo’s work, called Destination: Void, 2024, will hang alongside work by more than 20 artists including Gavin Turk and the Carters themselves who urged artists not to be scared of new technology.
Rob said: “Artists have always used tools at their disposal to create artworks and I think we’d be ridiculous not to embrace AI and use it in any way that might help us in the future.
“It's an amazing tool, and we really shouldn't run away from it. We should enjoy it and use it. It’s not going away so we should embrace it and use it to our advantage rather than fighting it.”
He added: “We’re having a portrait show of people that don't exist. I don't think that's ever happened before.
“This is a really good example of what we can do with AI because we're using an AI-generated website as a starting point - a launchpad for artists to develop ideas based around that.
“All the works in the show are handcrafted by artists who use ‘this person does not exist’ as a starting point.
“They're not taking a screenshot of that website and presenting it as a photograph. They are using that as a starting point from which they are then painting or creating a work.
“Some of the pictures are totally different from that starting point. You'd never be able to trace it back to the AI generated image.”
The show also features a portrait of David Bowie based on an AI image created to show how the singer, who died in 2016, would look if he were still alive.
Nick said all the invited artists “really jumped at the opportunity”, adding she hoped it would start “a dialogue there for people to discuss and to get people thinking about what this actually means”.
