Jan Robert Leegte

Jan Robert Leegte is a Dutch artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied architecture at Delft University of Technology, then fine art and interaction design at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, where he graduated in 1999. He began making websites as artworks in 1997, early enough to count among the first Dutch artists working online. Until 2022 he taught at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and at ArtEZ in Arnhem.

His subject is software itself: scrollbars, selection marquees, Google Maps and JPEG compression, handled as material. He once called HTML his "stone and chisel" (NRC, 2016). In Scrollbar Composition (2000) a web page splits into fields of scrollbars that jump around on their own, and it looks different in every browser and operating system. The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI acquired it together in 2016. From 2002 he also turned these elements into prints, sculptures and projections, and he ties the work to minimalism, land art and conceptual art, as in his 2013 remake of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty inside Minecraft. In 2021 the Van Gogh Museum showed Compressed Landscapes, websites that fetch landscape photos online and compress them as far as the JPEG format allows.

His onchain work began in 2021 with Ornament. Window and JPEG followed on Art Blocks in 2022. Web, a network of 1,000 linked webpages made with the Superposition team and released with Fingerprints DAO, came out in 2023, and Bas-relief, NFTs paired with plotter drawings and milled aluminium plates, came out with Tender in 2024. Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam and Office Impart in Berlin represent him.