This is a photograph of artist Colin Goldberg in Hearst Tower, NYC, with his work Kneeling Icon. Kneeling Icon is an example from the artist's Metagraph Series, a body of vector-based digital drawings begun in 1999. The piece was digitally drawn in 2004 and produced as a large-scale physical work in 2022. Kneeling Icon has an AR (augmented reality) component, in which the physical work animates when viewed through an AR app on a mobile device, transforming into a 23-second-long animation that was minted as an NFT in 2021. Both the physical work and the NFT were acquired by Hearst as part of their corporate collection in 2022.
Colin Goldberg with his augmented reality work Kneeling Icon in Manhattan’s Hearst Tower, where it is permanently installed.

Bronx-born artist Colin Goldberg’s work explores the relationship between technology and personal expression. His studio practice bridges multiple disciplines, notably painting, digital drawing and augmented reality. He is a recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Early Life and Education

Goldberg was born in the Bronx, New York in 1971 to parents of Japanese and Jewish ancestry, both Ph.D chemists. His grandmother Kimiye was an accomplished practitioner and instructor of Japanese Shodo calligraphy in Hawaii and Japan. He attended Southampton High School on Long Island’s East End, and went on to study painting at Binghamton University under the noted New York School Abstract Expressionist painter Angelo Ippolito.

Goldberg holds a BA in Studio Art from Binghamton University with a concentration in painting and a MFA in Computer Art earned under full scholarship from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

In the Summer of 2025, Goldberg was conferred an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree by Five Towns College on Long Island for his work in the arts. Wyclef Jean, a founding member of the Fugees, is a fellow recipient of an honorary Doctorate Degree from the College.

Career and Process

After graduating from Binghamton University in 1994, Goldberg moved to New York City to pursue his art career, establishing his first studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and then relocating to Avenue A in Manhattan’s East Village.

The artist helped to support his studio practice as a freelance designer in NYC advertising agencies, coding and designing some of the web’s first consumer-facing sites and launching brands such as Snapple, GOLF Magazine, and Popular Science online. At this time, he began experimenting with the same digital tools used in his client work to create his first abstract digital art.  Goldberg’s digital drawings are primarily vector-based and composed with a Wacom tablet in Adobe Illustrator, allowing them to be scaled to any size without loss of quality, as opposed to bitmap graphics, such as JPEG images, which become pixelated when enlarged.

In 2005, the artist ran a painted surface through his inkjet printer for the first time, establishing a process that has become a trademark of his paintings and works on paper. This combination of painting and printmaking follows a tradition established by artists such as Warhol and Rauschenberg who used silkscreen in combination with painting in a similar fashion.

Techspressionism

Goldberg coined the term “Techspressionism” as the title for a solo exhibition in Southampton NY in 2011. It was first described as a movement in the 2014 WIRED article “If Picasso had a Macbook Pro” and was later elaborated upon in a 2015 interview on the PBS show Art Loft.

The working definition of Techspressionism is “An artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience.”

In 2020, Goldberg initiated the formation of an artist group around the idea with three other artists: Steve Miller, Patrick Lichty and Oz Van Rosen. Helen Harrison, the longtime Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, the former home and studio of painters Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, has served as the group’s advisor since its formulation.

Over the course of the pandemic, Techspressionism grew into an international art movement comprised of artists working with technology from over 40 countries.  Since the formulation of the artist group in the Summer of 2020, there have been over 80K posts published on Instagram using the hashtag #techspressionism.

A core group of artists regularly meets online at “Techspressionist Salons“, monthly artist meetups where artists can present their work and discuss matters relating to art and technology.

Goldberg was the curator of Techspressionism’s first large-scale physical group exhibition, Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond, at Southampton Arts Center in Southampton, New York, in Spring 2022.  The exhibition included the works of over 90 artists working with technology from more than 20 countries around the world including Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Canary Islands, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and the United States.

There have been subsequent Techspressionism exhibitions in Brooklyn, Chelsea, Chicago and Uzbekistan. More information on Techspressionism is available at Techspressionism.com.

Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art

In 2022, Goldberg began developing a body of Augmented Reality artworks. These works are based on the artist’s first abstract digital drawings created over 20 years earlier. The series is called Metagraphs, in relation to the idea that the true  work is the code that describes the images, meta-representations which are eventually manifested as physical objects.

The first large-scale Metagraph was a 6×8 foot digital monoprint on vinyl called Kneeling Icon. The piece was first exhibited at the Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond exhibition in Southampton Arts Center, and was subsequently purchased by the Hearst Corporation in 2023. Kneeling Icon is the first AR work in Hearst’s corporate collection, and is now permanently installed in their corporate headquarters in Manhattan’s Hearst Tower.

The second work, called Circuit, debuted at the Kingsborough Museum of Art in Brooklyn last summer. These works have been collected into Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art, the first augmented reality abstract art book on Amazon.  When the reader views the works of art in the book with the Artivive mobile app, they animate right on the pages of the book. This book and the artist’s AR works have been published as open editions on paper, canvas and aluminum which are available online at metagraphs.art.

Goldberg’s works reside in numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collections of the Hearst Corporation, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Verostko Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University Hospital and the Islip Art Museum, as well as the AOI (Art on Internet) Foundation, and Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, one of the world’s largest private collections of early digital art.

Colin Goldberg lives and works in North Bennington, Vermont and has a daughter, Aya. He is represented in Vermont by Helmholz Fine Art, located in Manchester.  The artist’s first solo museum exhibition, Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art, will open at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in June 2027.

Colin Goldberg - Remote Portrait by Rick Wenner
Photo: Rick Wenner