Meet Heidi and Peter, the new darlings of the art world. They only have one arm each, can work for 24 hours straight and, at one stage, were destined to spend their careers on a car production line.
Heidi and Peter are two robotic arms – six-axis Kuka Robots to be precise – which have been re-programmed for a very different purpose: to create artwork as part of the studio of acclaimed UK artists Rob and Nick Carter.
And it was Peter, “the light-painting robot”, that created a dazzling artwork for the Evening Standard, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Frieze Art Fair. “We wanted it to be arresting, in bold colours, so the viewers are drawn in.” Nick says of the digital work which spells out the word Frieze in different colours.
Rob adds, “Frieze is all about the now and being cutting edge. What better way to celebrate that and look to the future than using robots and AI?” Light painting, he explains, involves the robot using light to trace out images on a long-exposure photograph, which is captured digitally.
Frieze, which kicks off on Wednesday, is one of the world’s preeminent contemporary art fairs and draws the big guns of the art world to the capital. “Try getting a hotel room in central London,” says Rob. Nick adds, “Frieze is still as relevant as it was. I remember the day it started 20 years ago, so clearly. It has put the spotlight on London ever since, it is just so important.”
Their conversation flows easily, overlapping rather than cutting each other up, as is understandable for a married couple who also work together they are gloriously in sync, and are welcoming when we meet. They are in the late stages of hanging a retrospective of their 25-year career in their gallery in west London, in a quiet street just north of Hyde Park. Nick (known as Nicky) is elegant all in black, Rob is in jeans and un-tucked blue shirt.
We first talk about their latest pieces, created by Heidi and Peter. “We’ve always used cutting-edge technology,” Nick says. They were early adopters of 3D printers and CGI in art, and for the past six years it’s been all about the robots. Heidi was the first, and when they saw it pick up the brush and start painting “we were a bit freaked out”, but they were also amazed.
With work held in collections by museums from the V&A to the Frick, as well as private buyers including Sir Elton John and the Beckhams, the couple have been mainstays of the contemporary art scene for more than two decades, and have always embraced new technology.
“Artists have always used the tools at their disposal, whether it’s Leonardo using a camera obscura or artists using new paints or tools. And we’ve been the same over the past 25 years,” Rob says. “If Warhol was alive, he’d definitely be using robots.”
There has long been scepticism about the use of technology in art, including around Rob and Nick’s early neon work and their digital still life pictures. “Anything that had a plug attached to it, people were very nervous of buying,” says Rob. But over time people have become more trusting of it, he adds. “Maybe that will happen with robots. I can’t understand why other artists don’t use them. They’re accurate to within a hundredth of a millimetre, they can work 24/7.”
But the artistic intent still lies with the artists, not the robot, he stresses. “They are an amazing tool. But you don’t get a robot, plug it in and it starts painting pictures. Every creative decision is being made by the two of us.” They have a programmer who translates their instructions for the robots – they are currently at 130,000 lines of bespoke code.
Is it any different from the studios of Renaissance masters, all the way to Damien Hirst’s spot paintings? “Certainly with Leonardo… and Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel on his own,” Nick says. “It literally is no different but there is a mental block.”
But what about the idea that when art is made, people connect to it because they know there is a human brain, ideas, imagination, and skill behind it… for want of a better word, a soul? “I think hopefully we are putting soul in our work,” Nick says. “And the final pieces are soulful, whether they are made by a machine or not… people were funny about photography to begin with.”
Painting will never die, Nick says. “People love analogue, it will always be relevant. It’s about bringing new technology adjacent and letting it all marry together… You’ve got to go with it. Everyone’s got to stop being frightened of it because they have no choice… The thing that people are doing that is really stupid is not embracing it. You can learn from AI and ChatGPT.”
Looking back for a moment, they say that putting together this retrospective was definitely “a walk down memory lane”, especially as it includes the first three pieces they ever made together.
The pair have known each other since they were 16, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later that they got together. Rob laughs. “I said, ‘Come on you’ve done your degree at Goldsmiths, let’s work together and you can paint on some pictures I’ve taken… It was part of the wooing process.”
Nick put glass paint on some abstract photographs, and while they were drying on the floor, a friend came round and bought them while they were still wet. “We thought, ‘Great, let’s make some more.’ And that was literally how it started,” Rob said. “If Billy hadn’t popped round…” he trails off.
At the time, Rob had been working in commercial photography, and was becoming disillusioned. Nick was already curating the art collection in the Groucho Club (she started at 19 while still at Goldsmiths, where contemporaries included Damien Hirst) which she still does. “It was all fairly chaotic the whole time,” Rob says, as Nick cuts in, “it was, but don’t let truth get in the way of a good story.”
I persuade her to tell me one that is true. “Once Will Self frisbeed a Gavin Turk [artwork] out of the window onto the roof. Chris Evans helped me get it… It turned out Will Self didn’t like it.”
Looking after the artwork in the debauched days of the Groucho must have been a challenge – Nick says smoking was the biggest issue, before the ban indoors, discolouring the artworks, and with drunk punters leaning back, cig in hand, they often burned holes in canvases (“now we glaze everything”). Then there was the time when Liam Gallagher defaced a picture because it depicted Manchester United, arch rivals to his beloved City. Not the sort of challenge most curators face.
That was the late Nineties, and the pair started making work in the mews where they still live, around the corner from the gallery we’re sitting in. They would lay their artworks on the floor; that was until their one-year-old daughter started flicking banana porridge from her high chair onto them. They knew it was time to get another space, and they still work in the Acton studio they found today, their robotic helpers now whirring alongside them.
At the turn of the century they put on a few shows in Cork Street, the place to sell artwork, and it was then that Elton John bought their work. They built a following, and as they experimented with technology; another key moment was when Sir Peter Blake bought one of their digital still life works.
“He felt all this stuff was coming and he embraced it. He’s very forward thinking… It was lovely to have his stamp of approval.” Then another piece of theirs was the first digital work bought by the American museum the Frick.
I ask about NFTs, the digital works that took the art world by storm in recent years. Rob says they toyed with the idea, “but I think we’ve always had an acid test of ‘Would we hang this on a wall at home’ and NFTs don’t pass that test. It’s not a route we’re pursuing any longer.” They have had friends for whom this has been very successful, “which is great,” says Nick. “But I don’t think it’s for us.”
Rob adds, “The whole thing peaked and collapsed in one day with the sale of the Beeple NFT for $70m [in 2021]. It was headline stuff but it kind of died on that day too.”
The couple have two daughters, Saskia and Jessica, who they dragged around galleries when they were small, despite their youthful protests, and it seems to have done the trick – they are both practicing artists now. But Rob and Nick are worried that galleries aren’t moving with the times and engaging young audiences.
“We’re bombarded by imagery all the time. Everything’s moving super swiftly so you have to move with it”, Nick says. If things aren’t made accessible “they just look at things on their phone.”
The next generation needs to be supported to keep feeding the creativity pipeline. “There’s such a wealth of talent in Britain,” Rob says. “London is still one of the art capitals of the world.”
As I get up to leave, walking past some of the highlights of a lifetime of acclaimed work, Rob says, “Hanging this show has made me look back at how we started. We were in a dark room with some torches shining light on some paper. Here we are 25 years later with a computer-controlled robot that’s seven-foot tall, using AI, incredible software. And most importantly is where we might be in 25 years’ time.” Nicky adds, “Things are moving so quickly, let’s see where it goes.”
