Ayla El-Moussa

Ayla El-Moussa is an artist working across photography, digital painting, moving image and hand applied materials. She grew up on a biodynamic farm and went to a Waldorf school where both her parents taught, spending her childhood on woodwork, painting and horses rather than screens. Her father handed her a camera and that settled it. She applied to exactly one university, an art school in London, and later transferred to Parsons in New York for the technical training. She began making moving image work in 2016 and entered the digital art world in 2021, when blockchain ownership finally gave that work somewhere to live. Her first major crypto piece, Ride The Wave, was commissioned for the Playboy inspired Miami Beach Art Collection and sold for close to 70 ETH, and she followed it with The Genesis Series, her first set of nude self portraits. Body of Water, made with a drone, was auctioned through Institut. Parts of Her sold at Christie's. She has made a Grail for PROOF, a card for the 6529 Memes, and a seven piece collection called Guardians on Shape. She is firm that the nude is not the subject: she wants people to look past the body at space, light and geometry.

El-Moussa is both the artist and the model in most of her work, which she frames as a reworking of the artist and muse relationship. The ocean is the founding image: the wave suspended in the sky, the figure standing at the edge of the elements. Over time the figure has dissolved into fragments and fields of color, and alchemical symbols and hand applied metals have entered the work as a language of transmutation. Bodies of Color, her most systematic series, uses a hundred Pantone schemes, a fast self portrait shoot as the base canvas, then hours of painting in Photoshop and Procreate, with each photograph split into four quadrants.

• Ride The Wave, her contribution to the Playboy inspired Miami Beach Art Collection
• The Genesis Series, her first nude self portraits
• Body of Water, shot with a drone and auctioned through Institut
• Parts of Her, sold at Christie's
• Bodies of Color, a hundred Pantone schemes worked into four quadrant self portraits
• PROOF Grails IV and a 6529 Memes card

On the show