Frank Nitty3000
Guerrilla Deconstructionist
With a career spanning over a decade and three continents, FrankNitty3000 has garnered a substantial following in the art world and on social media with his surreal and imaginative artworks. Collaborations with renowned fashion houses including Gucci, Burberry, Louboutin and Dior have propelled his art to wider audiences.
Frank's work has been showcased at the Gucci Garden in Florence, as well as in galleries in Amsterdam, London, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo. His art has been featured in prominent publications such as Wired, Vogue, Schön!, and Numéro.
Frank imbues his images with a simple elegance that betrays the intense, idiosyncratic process that his personal style requires.
Cultured Magazine
Rrreality
"In my work, I delve into the intricate relationship between seduction and manipulation within the realm of commercial narratives. These explorations lead me to repurpose imagery, bending its form and altering its intended meaning. Beyond the glossy veneer of “advertorial” images I explore a possible alternative interior motive, one that offers more than mere seduction.
Our collective relationship with commercial imagery often remains superficial. It’s a fleeting encounter, sometimes merely a passing glance. Words like “allure” and “beauty” weave through this visual landscape, leaving traces of intrigue and suspicion. But mostly they become part of a shared subconscious experience of distorted Reality.
I salvage images or sometimes create the illusion of salvaged images who are oftentimes discarded after their intended lifespan. These “relics” were meant to be seasonal, but I suspend them in time. The original storytelling and visual components are reconstructed into the shortest imaginable fictions: fragments of stories with their own beginning, middle and end, or perhaps they loop perpetually in a suspended interior part of the plot.
Rather than participating in the expected acquisitive interaction, I play a different game. I become the seducer, inviting viewers to step onto a bridge between the known and the unknown. Through juxtaposition I weave familiar scenarios with surrealist deconstruction and explore hidden patterns and themes or insert new imaginary utilities. I transform characters into objects and objects into characters.
Behind the curtain of pixels, I imagine an unseen stage mechanic- like a mischievous puppeteer controlling the work on the screen and guiding us into the image. sometimes by use of seductive trickery found in nature like patterns and repetition. Mechanisms and math fascinate me; they are the gears that turn this digital theater."—FrankNitty3000
“Art director and animator FrankNitty3000 creates spectacular eye candy, but this candy bites back. In his work across fashion, media and the electronic music scene, beauties and pop culture ephemera are sliced, diced, and remixed with their own grotesque glamour. It’s baroque excess by way of early 1980s MTV, but updated for the social media age, where tiny screens must convey maximum impact.”—GUCCI
Interview
Arts in Focus: FrankNitty3000 brings the grotesque into the beautiful
Friday 9 February 2024
There’s something compelling about anonymity and ambiguity in the art world – think of what makes people interested in the likes of Banksy, Deadmau5, or even our own Obsrvr with his proclamations about shark fin and penis size. In Hong Kong, one such enigmatic presence can also be found in FrankNitty3000, an artist who creates fantastically eye-catching works in the digital realm. Having made his way to our shores from the Netherlands, Frank’s work now consists of surreal, tessellated image loops created for commercial visuals, and has been featured in brands such as Gucci, Burberry, Louboutin, and Dior. 2024 is going to be a big year for Frank – he is set to be the first digital artist to embark on a 12-month world tour, and will also be selling his work to the public for the first time. We chat with the intriguing artist about his creative processes and inspirations, and his views on the Hong Kong art scene.
Your career trajectory — from fashion and advertising to video directing and art — is fascinating. What made you work in all those different fields?
After I graduated, I was still quite young and had to figure out what I really wanted to do. A lot of the peers who I graduated with already knew what they were good at, and I was still exploring. I was making music videos and started working on fashion design projects, then moved on to art director and creative director for fashion companies. But after a while, I decided I didn’t want to stay in a desk job, so I moved to Japan – mainly for inspiration and trying to reinvent myself.
How have your experiences influenced your artistic work?
When you work on the inside of trends and whatever is the hype of the moment, you realise that it’s quite manipulative, and how things are forced on people or are made up. Those kinds of ideas are interesting to me – how psychology works, and how things and people cross-influence. I meet a lot of interesting and talented people as well, and all these different things have influenced the art that I do right now.
The absurdist elements make your art quite eerie. They’re eye-catching and gorgeous, but at the same time, there’s something grotesque and unsettling about it. Is this intentional?
I love this kind of juxtaposition where, again, it’s a little bit manipulative. I try to manipulate the content in such a way that it becomes almost acceptable in your brain, whereas if you just analyse it intellectually, or write down on a piece of paper what’s happening on the screen, it would never work or be considered attractive. There’s definitely somewhat of a goal to create pretty unsettling things, but at the same time, it has to have a certain kind of aesthetic that hits you in your feelings somewhere.
Who or what are some of your greatest artistic influences?
Of course, there are a lot of things that I like. When I was young, I was always reading comic books that I wasn’t supposed to at that age, weird dark things; I used to be a street kid so [there was] skateboarding, and skateboard art, and art magazines; I went to a design school [Design Academy Eindhoven] so there are certain types of art movements and people like Dadaism.
All of that stuff really attracts me, but I try to leave it at the side because I realised once I start to zone into these things too much, I create things that are too predictable. What I really try to do with this work is turn it more into a meditation where I try to completely block out the so-called inspiration. Sometimes I don’t even listen to music when I work. I try to meditate and discover things that are just below the surface.
Do you think digital art will gain increasing relevance over traditional art forms and mediums, or do you think traditional art will always retain its importance?
I’m not really a big advocate of digital art, per se. I think the reason why an artist will choose a certain kind of tool is always to be precise. How can I, in the most precise way, get my thoughts onto ‘paper’? It doesn’t really matter what the tools are. Some people use a paintbrush; another person will paint with a t-shirt; somebody else will dip their feet in a bucket of paint and start walking; or blowing paint through a straw – and we’re just talking about painting. But all these things are about what the artist uses to precisely create what’s in their head.
I chose digital because it allows me to create exactly what I’m thinking about. In the end, what the tools represent is completely irrelevant to what you’re making. You can say digital is contemporary, or the future, but who knows what’s beyond that? I don’t really see a big distinction between traditional art and digital, and I don’t think that digital art represents the future. I think that digital art is just a tool that’s in the moment now.
Give us a sneak peek into something exciting that you’re working on next.
I will probably do some collaboration with HK Walls this year. Because of the way that buildings are laid out here in Hong Kong, their work is very cool.
I’m also audaciously doing a world tour – like Taylor Swift. I want to do something ambitious enough for people to think that it’s impossible to do as a visual artist. 12 cities in 12 months, or something ridiculous like that. It’s almost like performance art; it’s not just about showing the art, but the performance of doing a world tour is also part of the art.
I will start the tour here in Hong Kong during Art Basel, then it’s very likely that I will be at Salone del Mobile [ed note: a design fair in Milan]. And then along the way, it will figure itself out. That’s my plan for this year.
