Douglas Coupland is a Canadian artist and novelist who works across painting, sculpture, photography and text, exploring memory, technology, mass media and the accelerated pace of contemporary life. He began writing novels in 1991, coining the term Generation X in his debut work, and amplified his visual art production from 2000.
In 2016 his exhibition “Bit Rot” opened at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, later traveling to the Villa Stuck in Munich, and was described as his first large-scale solo exhibition in Europe. Spread across eight rooms, it combined his own paintings, sculptures and photographs with pieces from his personal collection, including a steel-cast work from Jenny Holzer's Truisms that Coupland keeps above his front door. The show also included a facial casting of David Bowie that Coupland calls a death mask, made as part of his sculptural series Redheads, which uses the MC1R gene linked to red hair as a metaphor for geography and mutation. Bit Rot took its title from the phenomenon of digital data spontaneously decomposing and was accompanied by a paperback of new and existing short stories and essays of the same name. The exhibition also presented work from Coupland's 2015 residency at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, including Search, a book compiled from a month of global Google searches, and The Living Internet, a kinetic sculpture built from 3D-printed forms meant to depict what he called “the chaos of raw searching”.
