Jen Stark — fractal-geometry NFT practice

2020

Artists: Jen Stark · Year: 2020 · Medium: NFT animations — fractal-geometry compositions in vivid color palettes · Substrate: Custom animation software and generative code; vivid-color-gradient fractal-pattern animations · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; Nifty Gateway (platform) Jen Stark, an American artist based in Los Angeles whose decade-plus prior sculpture and painting practice had established her as a well-known figure in the broader American contemporary-art scene, released her first NFTs on SuperRare in 2020 — making her one of the earliest commercially-established traditional-art-world figures to seriously engage the NFT primary market. Stark's practice is formally consistent across her 2010s sculpture, her 2020s NFT releases, and her occasional large-format installations: dense, kaleidoscopic, color-saturated geometric compositions that recall both psychedelic visual culture and Islamic geometric ornamentation. The 2020 NFT releases are in this archive specifically because they represent the broader contemporary-art world's bridge into the NFT moment. Stark came to the primary-NFT market as a fully-credentialed commercial artist with prior gallery representation (by Martos Gallery in NYC, Hashimoto Contemporary in SF), substantial prior press, and a developed collector base. Her NFT releases drew both her existing collectors into crypto buying and NFT-native collectors into the broader contemporary-art knowledge that Stark's practice engages with. What Stark's 2020 engagement contributed methodologically is a demonstration that digital-first NFT releases and traditional object-based exhibition practice could coexist in the same artist's career without either market consuming the other. Stark has continued to produce sculpture for gallery representation and NFT releases in parallel; her 2022 Museum of Contemporary Art Denver retrospective included both traditional-medium work and NFT-era digital work presented together, which was at the time an unusual institutional move. Stark has continued the dual practice through 2024-25. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Lore Stark had been exploring digital-output work since the mid-2010s — the sculptures she is best known for (hand-cut-paper geometric constructions) had frequently been photographed and digitally reproduced for catalogue and print-edition purposes, and the step to explicitly-digital NFT releases was smaller for Stark than for many contemporary-art peers. She has spoken candidly about the specific commercial calculus of her NFT engagement: the 2020-21 NFT market allowed her to support her studio in ways her gallery-representation sales alone had not, and the specific collector base she reached through NFT platforms was demographically different from her pre-2020 collector base in ways she found both practically and culturally interesting. Sources • SuperRare — Jen Stark collection (superrare.com/jenstark). • Martos Gallery, NYC — Jen Stark catalogue. • Museum of Contemporary Art Denver — Jen Stark retrospective (exh. cat. 2022).