Skeenee is a Belgian tattoo artist and painter based in Madrid, Spain, known for drawing skulls and skeletal anatomy across both physical and digital work.He was an early figure in NFT art-burning, selling his drawings as NFTs and then destroying the physical originals to explore where an artwork's value lives once the original is gone.
Skeenee studied classical animation in Vancouver, and in 2006 he won a place in VanArts' Lee Mishkin Film Making Scholarship program, which invited him to stay an extra year to develop his own short. When steady work in classical animation dried up, he moved into commercial animation before becoming a tattoo artist, giving himself nine months to master drawing, painting, and tattooing before the birth of his first child.His practice became centred on skulls and anatomy, culminating in his Animal Skull & Bones series.He also created $SKULL, one of the earliest social tokens, and used it to engage fans on Twitter and in a Skull Gallery he built in the virtual world Cryptovoxels.
His burning-art project unfolded in three stages, moving from “NFT + ART”, in which buyers received both a physical work and its NFT, to “NFT – ART”, in which he burned the physical piece so only the NFT remained. He pushed the idea further with “NFT +/- ART”, which let the buyer decide the original's fate.His Toucan Skeleton, screen print edition | NFT + Art, a screen-printed skeleton study, applied the same NFT + ART model by pairing a hand-painted print with each digital purchase.The burning-art series was documented with an opening manifesto, a set of short stories by the poet Puffin, and an accompanying exhibition, “Gallery on Fire”, staged in the virtual world Cryptovoxels with the collaborator Bullauge.
In 2022 Skeenee was one of the artists featured in Matt Kane's 24 Seeders installation at “DYOR”, curated by Nina Roehrs at Kunsthalle Zürich, alongside pioneers such as Botto and XCOPY.In 2023 he was selected from open applications for the “Alotta Money Charity Exhibition and Auction”, organized by Trevor Jones in aid of the cancer-care charity Maggie's, alongside artists including Pak and Hackatao.In 2024 he released CYB0RGS on MakersPlace, a phygital series pairing hand-drawn ink paintings and digital animations with Transient Labs' authentication technology.
