Jimmy Edgar (American, b. 1983),is a conceptual artist who creates digital sculpture, 3D imagery and generative art released as NFTs on the blockchain.His work explores abstract, surreal and metaphysical ideas around matter, materiality and space, often through digital readymade objects. His pieces draw on the neo-pop artist Jeff Koons, extending Koons's critique of commercial and advertising culture into blockchain art.
Edgar built his early career as an electronic musician from Detroit, Michigan, releasing music from 2004 on labels including Warp, Ultramajic and Innovative Leisure, and working as a video artist and photographer. These disciplines led him toward a visual practice that grew through NFT drops, beginning with OBSOLETE, an installation concept of sculptures modelled on Dyson vacuum cleaners sealed in acrylic that reference Jeff Koons's 1980 sculptural work The New. The related piece OBSOLESCENCE continued this exploration of the digital readymade. In 2021 the animated piece MIRROZ was exhibited at Art Basel Miami inside SuperRare's Monolith, a large digital canvas for displaying NFT art, showing rotating virtual mirrors of shifting gradients and light.
Edgar began using custom generative code in the series OPTIONZ, producing twelve source images that were expanded into a 100-piece collection sold on OpenSea. This process led to the series OBJECTZ, built from algorithmic patterns exploring matter, time and space, informed by the sculptural work of the Argentine artist Pilar Zeta, for whose piece Hall of Visions Edgar composed sound.In 2022 Edgar held his first solo exhibition, “OXYGEN”, at Vellum LA in Los Angeles, presenting thirteen works curated by Alice Scope and Sinziana Velicescu that portray ideas as evaporated forms taking on physical shape.The 2021 work IMMORTAL is a 1/1 digital portrait released on the platform Foundation.
