Ganbrood (Dutch, b. 1968) is the name under which Bas Uterwijk makes AI-generated portraits and pseudo-figurative compositions, using generative adversarial networks and diffusion models to construct images that were never captured by a camera.,Working at the intersection of photography and synthetic image-making, his practice probes how recognition and belief form around a picture, and how far authenticity can be simulated.
Uterwijk was born and raised in Amsterdam, the child of an actor and a designer.,He began in special effects and 3D animation in the 1990s, working on film and television projects before spending three years as an art director for Guerrilla Games on the Killzone series. He then worked for around thirteen years as a documentary and reportage photographer.When the pandemic halted his photography income, a friend introduced him to Artbreeder, and he began experimenting with BigGAN and StyleGAN to reconstruct historical figures from paintings.,Reconstructions of Napoleon and Jesus went viral on Instagram and were picked up by media outlets worldwide.He joined Hic et Nunc on Tezos in its early weeks of 2021, after deciding against Ethereum for its energy use, and later began minting on Ethereum as well.
His early Van Gogh reconstruction, built by averaging around thirty-four of the painter's self-portraits, was minted and sold on Hic et Nunc.He returned to the subject in Looking for Vincent, a series trained on thirty-five of Van Gogh's self-portraits and a rare photograph, shown at Kate Vass Galerie's booth at Untitled Art Fair in Miami in December 2024.,Algoritmo Divino, a 333-piece long-form collection drawing on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, launched by Dutch auction on Kate Vass Galerie's 0KAI on-chain technology in April 2023.Purgatorio, a BigGAN-based collage, was featured in a roundup of ten one-of-one NFTs on Tezos.At Paris Photo 2025, shown with Heft Gallery, The Second Gaze reworked Steve McCurry's 1984 photograph Afghan Girl to question authorship and cultural appropriation.,The piece prompted an uncomfortable in-person encounter with McCurry himself at the gallery's booth.
Ganbrood has been represented by Kate Vass Galerie since 2022, presenting his Kepler-inspired series SOMNIVM there that year and a solo presentation of the series Cenotaphs at Bright Moments in Tokyo in 2023.,,
