Calderúnicae | Kunstverein Ludwigsburg Museum
April 11 - June 21 2024
text adapted from interview with Ellie Pritts in Alethea Magazine
The latest exhibition "Calderúnicae" by US artist Ellie Pritts opens on 11 April at Kunstverein Ludwigsburg. Many people have probably already seen her work. Pritts has gained worldwide recognition in the fields of Web3 and AI art and has worked with global brands such as Microsoft and Adobe.
"Calderúnicae" is an artistic exploration of transcendence and depicts a volcanic planet inhabited by mythical beings. In Ellie Pritts’ world, the surreal meets the esoteric and the artist questions the boundaries between the real and the surreal and between the physical and the metaphysical. In doing so, she interweaves striking colour palettes, glitch aesthetics and self-portraits in an extremely harmonious way. It's no wonder, then, that well-known brands or international museums draw on her artistic skills. Pritts not only uses AI in her artistic practice, but combines it with outdated technology, such as bent video hardware from the 90s.
How did your inspiration for "Calderúnicae" come about?
I actually started creating the initial works for this exhibition over a year ago. I had just trained a LoRA on a previous body of work of mine and I was experimenting with it and creating these surreal, almost mystical portraits of imagined individuals. I started thinking about where these people came from and who they were, and I started forming a narrative in my head about them. I sat on that for a while, unsure when it would make sense to share them with the world. When the team at Kunstverein Ludwigsburg reached out to me proposing an exhibition I had so many ideas of what to do. But after seeing the space and learning that I essentially had free reign to do whatever I wanted, I decided this would be the perfect opportunity to fully dive into the world I wanted to create.
Is this your first time exhibiting in Germany? How did this exhibition come about?
This is my third exhibition in Germany. The first was at Kraftwerk Berlin in 2022 and then at EXPANDED.ART in Berlin last year. This exhibition came about when the team at Kunstverein Ludwigsburg saw my solo exhibition “In The Screen I Am Everything” at bitforms gallery in NYC last summer and decided they would like to work with me as well.
An article in the Smithsonian about you from 2022 asks, "Is this art?" in reference to digital works, including one by you. Can you tell our readers something about this?
The article was a response to the first AI art exhibition in the US at bitforms gallery in San Francisco. The question that kept coming up at that time was, “Is this art?” because the technology was very new to the public. The general sentiment was 1) creating art with AI is easy and 2) if it is easy to make, it doesn’t have much artistic value. While of course art being “good” is subjective, I do not agree with the idea that medium or ease of creation determine whether an artwork is truly art. I don’t believe an artistic output needs to meet any qualifications to be considered art. Fortunately, I see this attitude slowly changing as AI is becoming more commonplace and more everyday people have experimented with it to some degree and understand it better. As for myself and my practice, working with AI has certainly helped me create with more ease, especially physically. But my process is still very complex and time consuming, although the time flies by for me when I am creating.
