Rafaël Rozendaal

A Dutch-Brazilian artist based in New York, Rafaël Rozendaal trained at the Academie Beeldende Kunsten in Maastricht, graduating in 2002, after a childhood spent in the studios of his artist parents. Since the early 2000s he has worked primarily on the open web, treating the browser as a pictorial field and code as a material on par with paint. His earliest pieces, single-purpose websites such as paper toilet .com (2006) and jello time .com (2007), set the terms of a practice that has since expanded across lenticulars, tapestries, installations, NFTs, and, since 2023, painting, with each medium routed back through a fascination with screen-bound motion and interactivity.

Rozendaal is most often associated with a market gesture as much as an aesthetic one: his websites are sold by transferring the domain to a collector, whose name appears in the browser's title bar, while the work itself remains publicly accessible at its URL. The Whitney, the Stedelijk, the Centre Pompidou, the Hammer, the New Museum, and the Nam June Paik Art Center are among the institutions that have shown or acquired his work, alongside a Times Square Midnight Moment and a presentation at the Venice Biennale. In 2010 he founded BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), an open-source exhibition concept that has since traveled to more than a hundred venues.

In 2024 the Museum of Modern Art presented Light: Rafaël Rozendaal, organized by Paola Antonelli and Amanda Forment for the Hyundai Card Digital Wall in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby (November 2024 through September 2025). The installation sampled a rotating selection of his animations on a screen measuring nearly twenty-five feet across, with the entire exhibition occupying 135 kilobytes of code, a scale that has become characteristic of his economy of means. MoMA's collection now holds seven works by the artist.