Marat Guelman's exhibition at Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York (April 23–May 30, 2026) features AI-generated monoprints created in collaboration with the Montenegrin digital art group + - Komma. None of the works were painted by Guelman himself; instead, he programmed AI outputs based on historical models by artists like Picasso, Gauguin, Monet, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Turner, Matisse, and Richter. Every piece in the show incorporates an image of an atomic mushroom cloud, a motif Guelman uses to respond to Vladimir Putin's nuclear threats during the Ukraine war.
The exhibition matters because it pushes the long-running debate about the artist's role in creation to a new extreme—where both the artist and the artwork risk vanishing into AI-generated processes. Guelman's personal history adds urgency: a former Putin campaign worker turned gallerist and museum director, he fled Russia after falling afoul of authoritarianism, was declared a "foreign agent," and now uses art as a political tool. By embracing and ridiculing the nuclear threat, the show transforms aesthetic parody into pointed geopolitical commentary, raising questions about agency, authorship, and protest in contemporary art.