Robert Alice
artist, b. 1995, based in London, United Kingdom.
Robert Alice makes art, exhibitions, and books that investigate blockchains and their histories. Alice’s work is collected in public collections and libraries internationally, including the Centre Pompidou, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Bibliothèque Kandinsky, and the Monnaie de Paris. Alice’s work has been subject to reviews by leading curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and published in The New York Times , Financial Times , CNN, Forbes , ArtReview , ArtNews , The Art Newspaper, and more. Alice was the first artist to sell an NFT at a major auction house, and their landmark work Portraits of a Mind (2019 -) has been credited as one of the early catalysts behind the subsequent rapid growth in the blockchain art space. The project is now part of the National Collection of France.
Exhibitions of their work have been held internationally, including shows at Monnaie de Paris, Paris; Ullens Center of Contemporary Art, Beijing; Christie’s, New York; Sotheby’s, London and Hong Kong; Palazzo Lolin, Venice; Francisco Carolinum, Linz; Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg; the JinArt Center, Shanghai; and Le Freeport in Singapore among others. In 2021, Alice curated “Natively Digital” at Sotheby’s, bringing historic works to market, including Kevin McCoy’s Quantum (2014) — the first NFT ever made. The sale raised $17.1 million, setting records for several artists. A majority of the sales went directly to artists. A trained art historian, Alice has lectured internationally on blockchain-based art, most notably co-producing the first academic conference on NFTs at the in 2022, entitled 0xBAT, where they opened the conference with a keynote on a theory of NFTs. Alice has been a guest lecturer on blockchain culture at , , Christie’s Education, King’s College London, and Oxford University.
