Jan Robert Leegte (Dutch, b. 1973) has been making art on and about the internet since the 1990s, using websites, software, sculpture and prints to give physical form to everyday digital elements like scrollbars, cursors and JPEG compression.,,He was one of the first Dutch artists to make work for the internet, and since 2002 has translated that online practice into offline sculptures, prints and projections shown in gallery spaces.,
Leegte first studied architecture at Delft University of Technology before switching to fine art and interaction design at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.,Uploading his first HTML experiment by FTP in 1997 was a turning point. He realized the browser could work like a public, round-the-clock sculptural space, and began calling his web pieces net installations. At art school he was shaped by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. Once he began working online he found early net artists including JODI, Mouchette, Olia Lialina and Alexei Shulgin.As he puts it, “I don't use software to make art, I make art about software”.
His online 2000 piece Scrollbar Composition later became a series of spatial installations under the same title, its most recent version from 2017 a projection mapped onto a wooden construction that turns scrollbars into physical sculpture. The generative NFT series JPEG, begun in 2022, developed from his 1997 work Scan, which enlarged and slowly scrolled a JPEG image.Around the same time he released the NFT series Window (2022), which references bas-relief sculpture and carved petroglyphs.,
In 2023 Leegte released Web, a fully on-chain network of 1,000 unique HTML pages on Ethereum, developed with Superposition's Casper Schipper, Bram Bogaerts and Robin Smits and published by Fingerprints Studio. The public was invited to explore the network and bookmark favorite pages for a week before a one-hour Dutch auction.In 2025 Office Impart showed his Wanderer at Paris Photo, an on-chain work whose route is set by its own algorithm and recorded on the blockchain.
Leegte's work has been shown at the Van Gogh Museum, Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ZKM and the “DYOR” exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich.,,,In 2025 he took part in the group exhibition “Groundwork” at Heft Gallery in New York.At Art Basel's “Zero 10” in 2026, Office Impart and Upstream Gallery presented JPEG, Sightings and Orbits to explore compression, and the 200-edition Orbits sold out.,He teaches at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, and lives and works in Amsterdam.
