Kevin Abosch

Kevin Abosch is an Irish conceptual artist who lives in Paris and teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He works in photography, sculpture, installation, film, machine learning and blockchain, and his work keeps coming back to questions of identity and value.

He first became known for portraits lit against plain black backgrounds, a look he gave to objects as well as people. In 2013 the National Gallery of Ireland added three of his portraits, of Bob Geldof, Olwen Fouéré and Brian O'Driscoll, to its National Portrait Collection. Potato #345, a 2010 photograph of one unwashed potato, drew coverage around the world after he said a European businessman had bought it in 2015.

In 2018 he turned to Ethereum tokens. For I AM A COIN he issued 10 million tokens and stamped their contract address in his own blood on 100 sheets of paper. Forever Rose was a single token shared by ten collectors, with the proceeds going to the coding charity CoderDojo, and it has no visible form at all. YELLOW LAMBO turned another token's address into a yellow neon sculpture. With Ai Weiwei he made PRICELESS, which asks how we value human life.

1111 followed in March 2021: 1,111 generative works built from cryptographic strings and machine learning. SUN SIGNALS uses data on sun cycles and solar radiation. Museums that have shown his work include the State Hermitage Museum, ZKM, the Jeu de Paume, the National Museum of China, the Israel Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2025 the Pinacoteca di Brera showed Parallax, his generative video work, at Palazzo Citterio in Milan.