Nikita Panin (b. 1989) is a multimedia artist who moves between oil painting, ceramics and digital art built with artificial neural networks.Born in St. Petersburg, he trained in ceramics at the St. Petersburg Art & Design Academy, graduating with excellence in 2013, and has worked as a self-described “global nomad”, based in Bangkok, Thailand.
He worked primarily in oil painting between 2013 and 2020 before beginning to experiment with AI in 2019, a transition eased by coding skills he already had, which led him into blockchain-based digital art.In 2024 he released the series Color Fields, in which simple line drawings evolve through a dialogue with AI into meditative, color-driven portraits and landscapes. He has described the unpredictability of AI as “not a barrier but rather a source of inspiration”, comparing it to the resistance an artist finds in traditional materials like paint and clay.
His work has been described by critics as hypnotic and thought-provoking, noted for a mathematically precise approach that moves between abstraction and figuration. In the 2023 group exhibition “E-motions: Art & Isolation in the Age of Hikikomori” at Unit London, curated by Claire Silver, his contribution centered on anthropomorphic feline figures that blur the line between the real and the digital.In March 2023 he also took part in “AI Metaverse: Where Imagination Meets Technology”, an exhibition curated by Andrei Riabovitshev and released on MakersPlace.
