Sotheby's Year of GRAILS Continues with Auctions from Starry Night, The Latest Three Arrows Capital Digital Art Collection to Come to Market

Created in Affiliation with the GRAILS Collection, Starry Night Features 300 Works from Leading Digital Artists XCOPY, Beeple, Alpha Centauri Kid, Kjeti Golid, Otherworld, Dmitri Cherniak & More

The Garden by Otherworld

NEW YORK, 20 December 2023 – This January, Sotheby's will present the first auction of highly-coveted digital artworks from the fabled Starry Night collection, which was created in connection to the GRAILS Collection by Three Arrows Capital. 

The first sale from the Starry Night collection, which will take place 23 – 30 January, begins a new era for the GRAILS Collection, which totaled more than $20 million across multiple auctions and private sales at Sotheby’s in 2023, setting new records and benchmarks for digital art, including Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers #879 (The Goose), which sold for $6.2 million in June and more than doubled its high estimate. 

Featuring more than 300 works, the Starry Night collection is comprised of some of the most celebrated artists of the digital art movement, and was primarily curated to highlight unique one-of-one works by artists such as XCOPY, Otherworld, Alpha Centauri Kid, Kjeti Golid, Beeple, and Alotta Money among others. The collection also features important early generative AI artworks by Dmitri Cherniak and Helena Sarin. Created in 2021, the collection was curated by the pseudonymous collector Vincent Van Dough for Three Arrows Capital. 

In anticipation of the Starry Night auction in January, several works from the collection have already sold privately, including Grant Yun’s Starry Night Over Sausalito and Dmitri Cherniak’s A slight lack of symmetry can cause so much pain. 

“2023 was undoubtedly the year of GRAILS, and building on the momentum from the record-setting sales we held throughout the year, we are thrilled to kick off 2024 with Starry Night. Specially curated to spotlight the leading artists and creators at the center of the digital art movement, Starry Night, like GRAILS, is a singular collection that was formed during a unique time in the digital art market that is unlikely to ever be replicated. To share these much-coveted works once again will mark another milestone for the digital art community."

Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby's Head of Digital Art

Iterations II by Kjetil Golid

Select Highlights from GRAILS: Starry Night

Auction: 23 - 30 January

Otherworld

The Garden (Estimate $30,000 - $50,000)

Based on the 19th century historical painting The Last Day of Pompeii (1830-1833) by Karl Bryullov, The Garden epitomizes Otherworld’s reinterpretation of classical artworks for the digital age, mixing iconography from art history with the artist’s signature use of bright colors and hooded figures known as fiends. Blending collage techniques with illustration, Otherworld crafts new narratives through their reinterpretations, and their creations predominantly explore dark themes through vivid colors, creating a uniquely surrealist spin on classical works of art.

Alpha Centauri Kid 

til death do us part (Estimate $30,000 - $50,000)

The artist known as Alpha Centauri Kid entered the on-chain art scene by minting his inaugural artwork in 2021. Since then, he has emerged as a prominent figure in the space. Following unprecedented bidding wars during his Superrare debut, ACK made the bold decision to leave behind his 14-year government job to pursue art as his full-time occupation. His artistic style encompasses various disciplines, and often includes embedding hidden surprises, or easter eggs, within his works for collectors. He has also crafted several interactive artworks, which constantly evolve through time and will only be finished once the artist passes away.

Kjetil Golid

Iterations II (Estimate $10,000 - $15,000)

Norway-based Kjetil Golid is a generative artist whose work is informed by his background in system development and data analysis. Golid's fascination with algorithms and data structures is at the heart of his innovative approach to computational art, which he has been exploring for over a decade.

Golid's generative art pieces are functional systems that transform numbers into visuals, achieving an unexpected complexity while balancing the randomness of input that emerges from simple, deterministic rules. The Iterations series attempts to create the impression of structure by generating a random layout of blocks and repeating it in two directions. By making the process of repetition imperfect, with a small chance of mutating the initial layout, Golid creates the feeling of chaos and disarray through this highly ordered composition.

Helena Sarin

K-Meanearest Neighbors (Estimate $20,000 - $30,000)

Helena Sarin is a visual artist and software engineer who has always worked with cutting edge technologies. She finds inspiration in unifying patterns of nature and computation, and uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to reveal some of these patterns and reassemble them in intriguing ways. gen2GAN is a collaboration between Sarin and generative artist Dmitri Cherniak. Created in 2020 as a generative algorithm written by Dmitri Cherniak, generating thousands of outputs without any curation whatsoever, Sarin used those outputs as the dataset to model a pipeline of neural networks (GANs) that Sarin then hand-tuned and constructed. This output was curated by Sarin and Cherniak.