Kevin Specht (b.1983, Minneapolis, MN) is a self taught artist with a background in business and finance. His paintings explore the architecture of capitalism including its environments, aesthetics, and underlying systems. Spaces where capital performs itself: trading floors, corporate offices, shopping malls, luxury condos, restaurants. Places where transactions occur. Rooms engineered to feel permanent, frictionless, immune to decay.
He renders these scenes in a slow, smudgy pointillist style. Dots that function as pixels, data points, price signals. The surface becomes a digitized screen. Something once personal and physical is now uploaded, filtered, and flattened into code. They reference not only impressionism’s historical concerns with light and optics but also the granular abstraction of the market itself.
His work treats painting as a parallel system of speculative accumulation, where meaning is not created but extracted, repackaged, and sold back to us in aesthetic form. In this sense, the paintings are also metaphors for the contemporary art market; where collectors act as financiers, artworks circulate like financial instruments, and galleries function as stylized exchanges. They reflect how taste becomes currency, how scarcity is strategically engineered, and how art can simultaneously critique and participate in the very systems it reflects.
The process begins with creating a reference point from drawings, magazine advertisements and photographs. Sometimes these images are imputed into an AI program along with text prompts to generate composite imagery. The results are then fed back into the algorithm several times until something of interest is spawned. Those outputs are meticulously edited, recomposed, colorized and collaged, using them as blueprints for paintings. It’s not about automation. It’s about complicity: machine vision as both a tool and metaphor for how we see, select, and consume.
Solo Shows
Group Exhibitions
He renders these scenes in a slow, smudgy pointillist style. Dots that function as pixels, data points, price signals. The surface becomes a digitized screen. Something once personal and physical is now uploaded, filtered, and flattened into code. They reference not only impressionism’s historical concerns with light and optics but also the granular abstraction of the market itself.
His work treats painting as a parallel system of speculative accumulation, where meaning is not created but extracted, repackaged, and sold back to us in aesthetic form. In this sense, the paintings are also metaphors for the contemporary art market; where collectors act as financiers, artworks circulate like financial instruments, and galleries function as stylized exchanges. They reflect how taste becomes currency, how scarcity is strategically engineered, and how art can simultaneously critique and participate in the very systems it reflects.
The process begins with creating a reference point from drawings, magazine advertisements and photographs. Sometimes these images are imputed into an AI program along with text prompts to generate composite imagery. The results are then fed back into the algorithm several times until something of interest is spawned. Those outputs are meticulously edited, recomposed, colorized and collaged, using them as blueprints for paintings. It’s not about automation. It’s about complicity: machine vision as both a tool and metaphor for how we see, select, and consume.
Solo Shows
- 2023 - "Afterglow" Over the Influence - Los Angeles, CA
- 2022 - "Strangers" Nassima Landau - Tel Aviv, Israel
- 2021 - "Kevin Specht" Nassima Landau - Tel Aviv, Israel
- 2020 - "Tales of the Watchers" Valkarie Gallery, Lakewood, CO
Group Exhibitions
- 2020 - 9th Annual Supersonic Invitational - Spoke Art, San Francisco, CA
- 2019 - Blue/Green Environmental - Spark Gallery, Denver - 1st Place