The Irish artist Alan Bolton makes surreal, hyper-realistic 3D imagery, built primarily in Blender and AI tools, that sits between the familiar and the impossible. His work explores consciousness, suffering and the self hidden beneath what people present to the world. It draws on the psychological frameworks of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, treated not as academic references but as lived experience.
Bolton began making digital art at fifteen after discovering Photoshop, and went on to study business and management at the Dublin Institute of Technology. He then moved to Los Angeles to work as lead content creator for the YouTube channel MihranTV, helping grow it from 480,000 to 1.2 million subscribers. Back in Ireland, he produced visuals for brands and musicians including Tiësto, deadmau5 and Example, before turning fully to his own art practice in 2020 and releasing work on platforms including SuperRare, Foundation and Exchange Art.
He has since collaborated with deadmau5 and the record label hau5trap on two music and art projects, and partnered with Manchester City Football Club on a digital art collaboration.With deadmau5, he released The Chronicles of Creation, a six-piece collection of five animations and a signed still print, on MakersPlace in July 2021.He followed this with REBIRTH, a four-part solo collection released on MakersPlace in February 2022, including works issued as a 1/1, a 3-edition print and two 11-edition prints.For Manchester City Football Club, he produced Creation, a four-piece collection with a still image signed by each player on the team, followed a year later by Creation 2.0.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Beijing Contemporary Art Show in 2023, Context Art Miami in 2025 and a solo booth at NFC Lisbon in 2026.,After relocating to Lisbon, he presented new work inspired by Portugal that draws on landscape, identity and relocation, shown as both digital works and physical prints. He also took part in the city's museum tradition of the June altars of Saint Anthony, Lisbon's patron saint, building a digital altar in his own style for inclusion in the museum's yearly publication.
