Jürg Kobel is a digital artist who works under two names. As Tiegenhof, he creates GIF animations that rework older art historical images into new colours and new contexts, and as Koby, he makes AI-generated photo art from his personal archive and from text prompts. He began exhibiting as an art photographer in the early 2000s before turning to NFTs and digital animation in 2020.
He is also a collector of digital art, particularly GIFs, and in 2023 founded the GIF Gallery, an online gallery devoted exclusively to animated GIF art, which has been listed on the platform objkt since December 2024. Under his curation, the gallery has staged themed exhibitions built around Swiss cultural references and art history, including tributes to the painter Paul Klee and the sculptor Jean Tinguely.
His own work has been shown at institutions including the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, and the Museum für Kommunikation in Frankfurt, as well as at Kulturmuseum Bern, where in March 2022 he gave a talk introducing visitors to NFTs at one of Switzerland's first NFT exhibitions.,In 2025 he released Melting mountains through the New York gallery Heft on the platform Verse.
