Damjanski

Picture Theory is pleased to present The Portrait Show, an exhibition of new sculptures by Damjanski that considers portraiture in an age of automated perception. Translating the digital frames used in facial detection into physical objects, the artist examines how a computational system locates and categorizes the human subject. The resulting works invite reflection on the relationship between representation, identity, and the technologies through which we are seen.

Each work begins with a photograph supplied by its subject, pictured with a coin as a reference for scale. Damjanski’s software detects the face and places a labeled rectangular frame, known as a bounding box, around it. The frame is then transformed into a 3D-printed sculpture. The photographic likeness falls away, leaving a physical trace of the system’s encounter with its subject.

Installed at heights corresponding to those of the people portrayed, the sculptures form a gathering of absent figures. Each frame retains the dimensions of an individual face while bearing the same generic label: “face.” Through this tension between specificity and classification, Damjanski asks what can be understood about a person through the act of detection, and what remains beyond its frame.

Damjanski is an artist based in New York whose work explores the ways digital technologies shape our experience of images, institutions, and public space. Describing himself as an “app sculptor,” he works across software, augmented reality, photography, performance, and sculpture.

His projects include Bye Bye Camera (2019), an app that automatically removes people from photographs; Never Not There (2022), an augmented reality work commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and ZKM Karlsruhe; and Still Here (2024), a permanent augmented reality sculpture of the artist floating above Manhattan. In 2018, he co-founded MoMAR, an augmented reality gallery app that intervenes in exhibition spaces and curatorial processes.

His work has appeared internationally at the Centre Pompidou, ZKM Karlsruhe, MAMM Medellín, Kunsthalle Zürich, Postmasters, Office Impart, and Pioneer Works, among others. He participated in residencies at New Inc, the New Museum’s incubator in New York, and YBYTU in São Paulo. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Frieze, Artnet, Le Monde, and the BBC.