Artist: Keith Tyson

This summer, Hauser & Wirth presents ‘The Generative Universe,’ British artist Keith Tyson’s first exhibition in the city since 2009. Spanning more than three decades of paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works, the exhibition emerges from Tyson’s foundational conviction that the universe operates as a single generative system—a constantly shifting network in which all forms arise, transform and dissolve.

Originally trained as an engineer, Tyson was an early practitioner of generative art, often approaching creativity as the act of setting parameters within systems he set in motion, allowing a blend of chance, material behavior, mathematics and intuition to shape the outcome. A highlight of the exhibition is Tyson’s early-1990s Artmachine works, in which he programmed a device that generates prompts for him to execute by hand, shifting authorship away from the artist’s own preferences. Other works employ chemical processes, mathematical models, meditative painting, biological structures and handmade electronic devices—inviting viewers to consider the mysterious universal processes through which reality, and our consciousness within it, come into being.