Kevin Esherick is an artist based in New York whose AI-driven work moves between personal grief, media spectacle and questions of authorship, often made by deliberately interrupting an AI image generator mid-process.,He studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Notre Dame and worked as a freelance writer before turning to digital art in 2021.
After his older brother died when Esherick was twenty,he developed a technique he calls single-step diffusion, interrupting an AI image model's usual multi-step process after only one or a few steps to capture its rawest, least resolved output.He first used it in In Utero, presenting the model's raw single-step outputs unedited, then extended it in I'm With You, portraits trained on photos of his brother and interrupted mid-generation to leave only his hazy imprint.Tate curator Annie Bicknell described the resulting 24 portraits, each titled after a Red Hot Chili Peppers song,saying their images “mirror the way memory erodes over time”.
In Sky World (2024), Esherick rendered 24 images of global events, from the Trump assassination attempt to a mother and daughter crossing into El Paso, Texas, in the aesthetic of early-2000s PlayStation games using a custom LoRA trained on PS1 graphics with SDXL. He described the series as “phenomenological journalism”, an attempt to register the feeling of living in an era he calls the perpetual event, where images and spectacle mediate reality.
In February 2026 Esherick had his New York solo debut at Heft Gallery, showing two bodies of work. For Homages, he trained AI models to mimic the styles of artists he admired, including Beeple, George Condo and Cindy Sherman, and offered each artist the chance to claim and profit from any piece. For Ablation Studies, he fed existing artworks by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Georgia O'Keeffe into an AI model and interrupted its processing partway through, producing blurred renderings he described as a way of looking into the model's quasi-cognitive process. Three paintings made in George Condo's style drew a cease-and-desist letter from Condo's attorneys, and the gallery kept them on view, covered in black velvet beside a redacted copy of the letter. Esherick argued the paintings were new works, not derivatives of any specific Condo image, and legal scholars noted there is little precedent for whether style itself can be copyrighted.The show also marked the start of The Artist Is Absent, a year-long performance inspired by Tehching Hsieh in which Esherick cedes his practice to an AI trained on his own work.,
