Jana Stýblová is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked across painting, photography, performance, music and digital art since 2006, when she was known mainly for fractal art made with the software Apophysis. She holds degrees in astrophysics and art, alongside a decade-long career in the design industry. In 2013 she began Often Minimal, an ongoing Tumblr-based practice of minimalist illustrations built from color, shape, space, balance and scale.
Made with hand painting, Photoshop and Illustrator, the series has gone through what she calls an abstract period, a noir period and a marketable period, guided by the idea that “Just This, Is Enough”. Often Minimal has inspired other minimal design projects and, by her account, even the careers of some tattoo artists. Individual pieces have at times been copied without credit, which led her to begin selling the series as NFTs on Foundation to establish ownership and provenance on the blockchain. With her permission, developer Steven Holmes built an automated bot, released as oftencriminal.com, that uses machine learning to remix Often Minimal pieces into new works, framed as commentary on the ease of digital thievery.
