Transforming Films: 2009–26: EXTENDED - now open until the end of January 2027

In 2008, Rob and Nick Carter began a landmark investigation into the boundaries between historical painting and digital time. By translating static masterpieces into ‘moving paintings’, they invited viewers into a state of durational looking — a ‘slow art’ philosophy that saw the original Transforming series enter the permanent collections of the Mauritshuis and the Städel Museum, with further works held by The Frick Pittsburgh and exhibited at The Frick Collection, New York.

After an eight-year sabbatical from the series, this exhibition marks a vital evolution. While earlier works utilised the rigid precision of CGI to mimic the brush, this new cycle utilises human-guided AI as a volatile, painterly material. The artists treat the software not as an automated generator, but as a ‘digital brush’ requiring obsessive, frame-by-frame curation.

The works on display celebrate a transcendent lineage of artists who investigated light and form through repetition. Here, the luminous, shifting fog of Monet’s London sits alongside the rhythmic ‘visual music’ of Kandinsky’s abstraction. Elsewhere, the series explores the quiet, domestic soul of Anna Ancher’s interiors, capturing the subtle movement of light across a room in a way that feels closer to the original canvas than ever before.

Through hundreds of hours of precise prompting and manual intervention, the artists have reclaimed the digital space as an atelier of slow craft. These films possess a vital spark and a soulful imperfection that defies pure calculation, reminding us that even in an age of artificial intelligence, the most profound transformations remain defiantly, and beautifully, human-guided.