Bård Ionson was creating digital art before most knew “digital art” was a thing. Now, he’s achieving master status in the cryptoeconomy’s blossoming fine arts scene as one of the ecosystem’s most promising and visionary rising artists.

Whereas Ionson’s life has always pulled him toward all things technological, his mind and heart have always pulled him toward art. The result is the artist’s richly layered works, which are at once both human and machine-like, organic and synthetic, literary and hallucinatory, concrete and mystic.

To achieve these beautiful tensions Ionson creates through distortion, and his varied creative toolbox reflects his artistic demands: his past works have employed artificial intelligence, electronic sculptures, glitch scanography and videos, and oscilloscopes. Knowing Ionson’s spirit, it’d be no surprise to see the artist add even more techniques to his creative wheelhouse from here.

Source: SuperRare, “Subversion of the Cross” by Ionson

Yet don’t take my word for it when it comes to the dazzling style and power of Ionson’s works, just look at his legacy around Ethereum’s rare digital art space. His works have grown increasingly coveted by collectors on leading NFT art platforms like Async Art and SuperRare, where his 1/1 pieces are starting to routinely fetch primary sales in the 4-5 ETH range lately.

Additionally, his art has been featured and sold at premier events like ETHDenver, Rare Art Festival NYC, Miami Blockchain Week, and the Virtual Rare Art Fair. He’s also been a mainstay at recent CADAF shows, like CADAF Miami 2019, CADAF Online 2020, and CADAF Digital Art Week 2020, where his works have been selected and highlighted by professional art curators.

Why’s Bård magic, then? Because he’s trailblazing at the crossroads of multiple fields, weaving art and tech with an excellent eye and steady hands, taking inspiration from other masters like Nam June Paik, Salvador Dali, and beyond, and doing this all in sublime fashion and with an approach and high-level concepts that only a great artist can bring to the table. Savvy digital art collectors are starting to pay attention, accordingly.

Arriving in Crypto

After the 2016 U.S. election, Ionson dove deep into art as a means of protest and catharsis. Along this path, the artist came upon Margat Atwood’s dystopian masterpiece “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which he stumbled upon the notion of prayer machines that would read out prayers for a small sum of money.

Ionson decided to experiment with creating his own Twitter-based version of the machine, which led him to the topic of micropayment systems and then on to cryptocurrency and blockchain projects like Ethereum. Ionson minted his first NFT, “Alien Intelligence,” on SuperRare in November 2018, and the artist’s been pioneering around crypto’s brave new worlds ever since.

Source: SuperRare, “Alien Intelligence” by Ionson

What’s Next

This month, Ionson is releasing an entrancing new work, “The Gate,” on programmable art platform Async Art. It’s a rich and deep creation that’s really worth diving into, so in the coming days I’ll be writing a review exploring why it’s truly an amazing piece of art.

Stay tuned, as “The Gate” is among Ionson’s finest works yet in an already impressive personal canon. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and catch up on the artist’s portfolio to date.

Website: bardionson.com

SuperRare: superrare.co/bardionson

Async Art: async.market/u/bardionson/collection

MakersPlace: makersplace.com/bardionson

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