Christopher Kulendran Thomas, an artist who has been building his own neural networks for over a decade, is showing new paintings and a video installation at Gagosian's Upper East Side location, with concurrent exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and upcoming at the New Museum. His series 'Peace Core' uses AI trained on Sri Lankan painters to generate compositions that are hand-painted onto canvas, depicting Mullivaikkal beach—the site of a 2009 massacre of Tamil civilians during the Sri Lankan civil war. The Gagosian show also features a 24-screen video installation that algorithmically remixes American TV footage from the morning of September 11, 2001, before the attacks became visible.
This work matters because it represents a sophisticated, historically grounded use of AI in painting, directly engaging with colonial art history and traumatic memory. Kulendran Thomas's simultaneous presence at Gagosian, MoMA, and the New Museum signals his rising prominence in the contemporary art world, while his method—training custom neural networks on Sri Lankan artistic traditions—offers a model for how technology can be used to interrogate rather than erase cultural specificity. The work's emotional ambiguity between horror and beauty challenges viewers to inhabit complex historical positions, making it a significant contribution to discussions about art, technology, and postcolonial identity.
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