Rob and Nick Carter: AI is exciting for artists, the possibilities are limitless

The husband-and-wife duo tell Nancy Durrant about embracing tech in the art world and their exclusive print for Standard readers

- Nancy Durrant

IT’S a weird feeling, when your brain knows something to be true, but you can’t bring yourself to fully believe it (see also: the Abbatars at ABBA Voyage). This is what’s happening when I look at today’s cover of the Standard. It looks like a meticulous illustration or digital invention; I know perfectly well that it’s a near-microscopic, photographic image of a splodge of actual paint. I just… can’t quite get my head around it.

“In real life it’s probably two centimetres square, something like that,” says Rob Carter, one half of the artist duo Rob & Nick Carter with his wife, known otherwise as Nicky. “But with the advent of super high-powered digital cameras — this is a 150 megapixel camera — we can capture all that detail from a tiny little paint blob and blow it up to a massive scale.”

The image, part of a new series of works by the pair that continue their longstanding experiments combining painting and photography, is being made available as a limited edition print (just 95 will be made) exclusively to Standard readers, for one week only, for the extremely discounted price of £350. It’s a far cry from their usual prices.

“Some of our work is quite prohibitive, cost-wise, because it is so labour intensive to make,” says Rob. “Some of our transforming films have taken 5,000 man-hours of digital animation, so that takes them beyond a certain price point.” Their Transforming Still Life Painting, a lavishly framed threehour looped digital rendering of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Vase with Flowers in a Window (1618) in which night gradually replaces day, and a caterpillar and a butterfly visit the scene, sold at auction in 2023 for just under £53,000.

“When people say, we can’t afford your work, we say don’t worry, we can’t afford it either,” laughs Nicky.