Victor Mosquera

Victor Mosquera is a Colombian Canadian artist. He was born in Bogota, emigrated to Canada as a young person, and is now based in Vancouver. He describes displacement as the centre of his practice, the feeling of living between cultures, memories and shifting ideas of belonging. His pictures are surreal and narrative: layered compositions, luminous colour, and a recurring cast of figures that look as though they have come up out of the unconscious. He draws openly on Renaissance painting, African ceremonial art, Pre Columbian sculpture and Japanese woodblock prints alongside film, video games and illustration. Before NFTs he built a career in music and event artwork, making posters and covers for ODESZA, Kid Cudi, G Jones and Dirty Heads. He made his first NFT drop in November 2020 and released Everything Connected on Nifty Gateway in February 2021, followed by LOTUS in April 2021, a set of animated works that included an open edition. His work has been exhibited at Christie's in New York, at Sotheby's in London, at Gana Art in Seoul and at CICA Vancouver, and he has appeared in Time. He was among the more considered sceptics about generative AI in the crypto art conversation, arguing from the position of someone whose style took years to build by hand.

He builds surreal figurative images that mix graphic design discipline with psychedelic and science fiction colour, art nouveau line and a strong debt to Pre Columbian and ceremonial masks. Recurring subjects are the human mind, spirituality, the afterlife, connectivity and the unconscious. His NFT work took those still images into animation, most visibly in the LOTUS series on Nifty Gateway. Alongside the fine art he has a long run of commercial poster and cover work for musicians, and in recent years he has moved back toward large narrative paintings shown in gallery and auction house settings.

• Everything Connected, his Nifty Gateway debut collection in February 2021
• LOTUS, his April 2021 set of animated NFTs on Nifty Gateway
• Poster and cover artwork for ODESZA, Kid Cudi, G Jones and Dirty Heads
• Exhibiting at Christie's New York, Sotheby's London and Gana Art Seoul
• A surreal figurative style built from Pre Columbian, art nouveau and psychedelic sources
• Being one of the more careful sceptics about generative AI among working crypto artists

On the show