Patrick Amadon is a Los Angeles-based artist who moved from traditional painting into glitch art, beginning to work digitally in 2012. He fuses graffiti and glitch techniques, corrupting and merging paintings and photographs into animated loops. His work engages counterculture and political themes, and he has used public billboards and screens to embed hidden protest messages.
In March 2023 his video work No Rioters was displayed on a large digital billboard on a Hong Kong department store during Art Basel Hong Kong, flashing brief text with the names, ages and jail terms of pro-democracy protesters. After a photograph revealed the hidden content, the billboard's owner removed the piece, and Amadon said its removal completed the work's message about the erosion of free speech in the city. He has since been barred from travelling to China and neighboring territories because of the piece. That same month, Amadon withdrew his work from Sotheby's planned “Natively Digital: Glitch-ism” auction in protest at the absence of female and nonbinary artists from its lineup. Amid the wider backlash that followed, Sotheby's postponed the sale and relaunched it two weeks later under a new title with a broader roster of artists. Amadon was not invited to the relaunched sale, and the reasons for his exclusion were never made clear.
