John Gerrard

Artist

John Gerrard · johngerrard.net ↗

Based

Born 1974, Tipperary, Ireland. Lives and works in Dublin and Vienna. Represented by Pace Gallery

Raster

raster.art/artist/john-gerrard ↗

In the set

Petro National ↗ · Art Blocks × Pace · 196 editions · 2022
World Flag ↗ · 195 editions · 2023

Now

Art Basel Zero 10, Basel, 17–21 June 2026 (with Fellowship); SPIRITS summer-solstice launch at LACMA, 21 June 2026

Links

Instagram ↗ · X ↗ · Full bibliography ↗

John Gerrard makes worlds, not pictures. Since the early 2000s his medium has been the real-time game engine, the same software that renders video games, turned to a wholly different purpose: slow, exacting simulations of real sites that run live, in step with the sun and the seasons, with no beginning and no end. The subject underneath nearly all of them is energy, and the power it buys. He arrives in the AB[500] not as a painter trying on a new tool but as an artist who has spent twenty years arguing that the simulation is the native art form of the petroleum century.¹

The game engine as a stage

Gerrard trained as a sculptor (the Ruskin at Oxford, then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College Dublin), and a residency at Ars Electronica in Linz put a team of programmers and a game engine in front of him. His first developed engine work, One Thousand Year Dawn (2005), shows a young man on a beach watching a sunrise that the code will take a thousand years to complete. Time becomes a sculptural material. He came to think of the engine as a stage, with the sun as an actor that can be told to rise over ten seconds or ten centuries in a single line of code.²

The lineage he names runs through Bruce Nauman and the minimalists: resolved, hermetic objects placed on a platform and left to perform. What follows that first work, the Smoke Trees, the Dust Storms, the Grow Finish Units and the Google Farms, are all portraits of industrial systems most people never see. Gerrard insists they are not films. "This is information," he says, "this is not image, this is not a record." You are watching data, rendered frame by frame and discarded, the way the real flows of capital and energy move and vanish.³

Western Flag and the petromodern

The work that carried Gerrard to the broadest public is Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017), commissioned by Channel 4 for Earth Day. It rebuilds the site of the 1901 Lucas Gusher, the first great American oil strike, now barren, and plants in it a flagpole streaming black smoke: an invisible gas, carbon dioxide, given an image and a banner. Gerrard calls it an invisible sculpture and a flag of mourning for the Anthropocene. It has since stood at Somerset House, in Madrid, in Hamburg, and at Desert X in the Coachella Valley.⁴⁵

Around the same flag idea grew the Flags series: simulations of gasoline spreading across the surface of major rivers, the Danube, the Amazon, the Nile, the Yangtze. Working with his programmer Helmut Bressler, Gerrard modelled the iridescent sheen of oil on water with a thin-film refraction algorithm, the same physics that makes a petrol rainbow in a puddle. The result is a beauty he calls a toxic sublimity: the allure of petroleum and its danger held in one image.⁶

Petro National

Petro National (2022, Art Blocks × Pace, 196 editions) takes that algorithm on-chain. Each of the 196 works is a nation or region rendered as a gasoline spill on the world ocean, its thickness and iridescence set by that country's per-capita petroleum consumption: thin and blue-green for the low consumers, thick and lustrous for the high. Each world runs on the local time of its capital, with its own seasons. It was Gerrard's first WebGL piece, a spatial, temporal world placed directly in the browser, and the first Web3 project in the Art Blocks and Pace Verso collaboration. In 2023, Petro National #16 (Nigeria) entered the collection of the Centre Pompidou.⁷

Live on Art Blocks: Petro National ↗

World Flag

World Flag (2023, 195 editions) reimagines the national flag as a banner of coloured virtual smoke, each one sited in a fictitious future desert. The premise is bleak: the state as a ghost of itself, the flag a militaristic sign for a doomed, place-based order. All 195 are generated from a single 112 KB script stored on-chain, using WebGL so the worlds render directly in a phone or a browser, post place, post geography. The works were released in the order of their countries' greenhouse-gas emissions, highest to lowest, and Gerrard dedicated a tenth of his proceeds to Hometree, the nonprofit restoring temperate rainforest on Ireland's Atlantic coast.⁸

Live on Art Blocks: World Flag ↗

The two AB[500] works are bookends of a single argument. Petro National reflects what each nation burns; World Flag ranks what each nation emits. Together they turn the most ordinary instruments of the state, the flag and the fuel gauge, into a ledger of the climate crisis, written in code that will keep running for as long as the chain does.

SPIRITS and the browser as public space

Gerrard's current work pushes the same instinct further into everyday screens. SPIRITS (2025–26), presented by the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, is a year-long, browser-based solo that unfolds across the four solstices and equinoxes. He gathers plastic sandals washed up on beaches around four great bodies of water, photoscans each into a high-resolution Gaussian splat, and lets you turn the object on a touchscreen until it reveals what it is made of: solidified petroleum, the oil age washed back ashore. He argues the browser is now the most important site we have for public art, and the touchscreen a cultural superpower artists have been locked out of.⁹¹⁰

I suspect the game engine is the most important medium of these times.

Art Basel Zero 10

In June 2026 the argument reached the largest stage. Zero 10, Art Basel's initiative for the art of the digital era, made its Basel debut from 17 to 21 June 2026, co-curated by the artist Trevor Paglen and Eli Scheinman under the theme The Condition, which traces seven decades of instruction-based and computational art.¹¹ Gerrard showed Western Flag, Flare (Oceania) and Standard with Fellowship, and during the opening sales his STANDARD (2023), a simulation of a white flag rising from desert water vapour, sold for USD 500,000.¹² On 21 June, the longest day, the SPIRITS summer-solstice phase launched with a dance at LACMA led by the electronic musician Richie Hawtin.⁹

Why he belongs in the AB[500]

The AB[500] records the first five hundred Art Blocks projects, the moment generative art assembled its canon on-chain. Gerrard is among the few in that set who came to it already established in the museum world (Tate, MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, the Hirshhorn, IMMA, M+) and chose the blockchain anyway, because WebGL let him put a living, spatial world in anyone's pocket.¹³ Petro National and World Flag are not a blue-chip artist dabbling in NFTs; they are the logical next move for a practice that always wanted the broadest possible public and the most direct possible image of power. That is why they sit in the set, and why they read as foundational.

MOTZKO's digital art collection adds a collector-side record of that practice through holdings of Smoke Hands, Petro National, Bone Work (Gulf of Mexico), World Flag, and crystalline work (arctic) 20.2.17.1.¹⁴

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete and growing bibliography on Gerrard, see the John Gerrard links page ↗.