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A compact index for triage — not a discovery engine for cross-work patterns. Drill into Vision, Record, then Sessions for how a work was reasoned.
220 works
Breaking Down Art
Transfer painting built from a failed Oslo canvas — the exact size requested for a Berlin group show.
Megacities
A satellite-imagery collage merging nine Arab League cities — Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, Amman, Algiers, Casablanca, Dubai, Damascus, Beirut — into one continuous urban geography.
Breaking Down Art
The painting compresses what was, by the artist's own account, a sprawling and overwhelming exhibition experience into what reads as a single continuous room.
Breaking Down Art
A transfer painting made at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in 2007, combining multiple photographs from Skulptur Projekte Münster into a single landscape composition.
OG Oil Paintings
An invented, ghost-white Acropolis beneath a Turner-inspired vortex of a sun, painted in a San Francisco backyard at the close of a self-taught period.
OG Oil Paintings
A wide, radiating sky dominates the upper two-thirds of the canvas — bands of deep orange, rose, and red curving outward from a bright central point near the horizon, cooling through white and pale…
Megacities
This aerial photograph depicts a densely populated urban area with a prominent river flowing through it.
Vanishing Landscapes
The composition is a tall vertical field split cleanly into two unequal registers: a vast, nearly featureless pale sky occupies roughly two-thirds of the canvas from the top down, giving way at the…
Megacities
A seamless collage of satellite images of Germany's nine largest cities by population — Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund, and Stuttgart — stitched into…
Videos
A four-minute video monologue in which Bernard Bolter recalls the 1998 preliminary entrance exam at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam — the act of making a painting to destroy it in the room…
Installations
A collaborative street performance made with Jur Jarring at the HKU Utrecht in 2000.
Vanishing Landscapes
Transfer painting of South Elliott and Lafayette Streets, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, fall 2004.
Drawings
A small pen drawing made on location in Amsterdam, circa 1997–98, during Bolter's first solo travels through Europe.
Watercolors
Watercolour and pencil on paper, made on location on the roof of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996.
OG Oil Paintings
Oil on raw, self-stretched canvas, painted in a covered backyard in San Francisco's Sunset District on the artist's birthday in 1993.
Art Collision
A digital print and acrylic collage on canvas depicting the New York skyline as a tree growing from the earth, with painted housing project pairs extending to the left — a visual translation of the…
Digital City Series
A seamless digital composite of Basel, Switzerland — the founding work of the Digital City Series.
A Colorful History
A 1899 photograph of the Brandenburg Gate, looking west along the walkway, transferred onto canvas and painted with flat acrylic colour fields — the first painting in the Gates of Perception series,…
A Colorful History
The composition is a wide horizontal field, roughly twice as wide as tall, divided by a hard continuous horizon line running the full width at close to the vertical midpoint.
Art Collision
A photo-collaged composite Manhattan skyscraper framed by a hand-painted grey sky, flanked at its base by RGB and CMYK color swatches.
Vanishing Landscapes
OG Oil Paintings
A one-line, flat figure loops from foot to hand to foot across a green and navy field, its hand reaching into an invented wooden trellis rendered in perspective — the only dimensional element in an…
Art Collision
A photo-composite lower-Manhattan skyline -- Manhattan Bridge at left, an unidentified tower piercing a hand-painted sky at right -- fronted by an undulating, hand-painted checkerboard in white, red,…
OG Oil Paintings
A small vertical oil-on-canvas composition dominated by an intense purple-to-near-black sky rendered in heavy, ominous brushwork, occupying roughly the upper two-thirds of the canvas.
OG Oil Paintings
The composition is organized around a single dominant vertical form that bisects the frame from top to bottom, planted at the convergence point of a deep, symmetrical landscape.
OG Oil Paintings
A dark, near-black wooden cross occupies the vertical center of the canvas, planted on a curving, fisheye-distorted ochre path.
OG Oil Paintings
An imagined San Francisco landscape testing Goethe's warm/cool color theory for the first time, with the young artist himself reading beneath a tree.
Gates of Perception
The composition is dominated by an expanse of flat, even blue occupying more than half the frame, pressing the horizon line low and giving the image a held, suspended quality before any architectural…
Mediums of Perception
The sky is far denser with aircraft than World War One's — 30+ planes and formations rather than a sparse handful — with real variety in altitude and clustering: fighters and bombers group in tight…
OG Oil Paintings
A statue of two stacked figures — red above, green below — stands on a cliffside plateau overlooking the Pacific, the upper figure pointing out past the edge beneath a Turner-like burning sky.
OG Oil Paintings
The composition is viewed from beneath a covered porch or overhang, looking out into a backyard.
OG Oil Paintings
Fisheye self-portrait, oil on canvas, painted on the artist's 21st birthday from a hill in the SF backyard, with San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge (visible as a thin red structure) across the…
OG Oil Paintings
A fisheye-distorted view down the interior aisle of a train car, oil on canvas, 8" x 8".
OG Oil Paintings
A narrow panoramic oil painting of a figure walking along a lagoon-side walkway toward a guillotine, under a Turner-inspired sunset sky.
A Colorful History
The composition sits on a hard horizontal division roughly two-thirds down the canvas, the flat pale sky-blue above meeting a solid ultramarine-navy below at a horizon that bows gently upward at…
A Colorful History
Two fishermen cast lines at Baker Beach as the Golden Gate Bridge rises unfinished behind them, San Francisco, 2016.
A Colorful History
The Victorian chateau Cliff House occupies the right third of the frame, perched on a rocky headland — a black-and-white photographic transfer rendered in fine architectural detail against flat,…