Zien presents Sentimental Graffiti, the first digital-physical NFT drop from Henry Sprite, also known as Sprite Bonkler, one of the artists and creative directors behind the infamous Milady Maker NFT collection.
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Sprite’s new work is at the edge of what it means to create and look at images today. An internet-native artist with deep experience leading new online art worlds, in Sentimental Graffiti, Sprite also transports these modes and experiences into physical space.
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⁠The paintings come first, but they start digitally, with copious source material fed into a custom AI pipeline, then arranged by hand into collaged compositions to then be fed back through another set of AI adjustments. The results feel like new types of collages enabled with digital assistance, reminiscent of renowned artist Michel Majerus’ push-and-pull play with digital technologies in the 1990s.
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⁠Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, painters that captured the schizophrenic advance of the 21st century, are also key references. So is Japanese anime—Sentimental Graffiti is named after a 1990s dating simulator game—especially the way that anime is fine-tuned and engineered to become the optimum addictive image.

These digital AI compositions are the source material for the paintings with Sprite responding to them freely by hand using oil, spray paint and collage onto canvases stuck to walls across hotels and venues around the world. Once stretched onto canvases, the paintings can also be slotted into clear vitrines. Like the protective sheaths for collectible cards, the vitrines preserve and amplify the aura of these paintings. At the top of the vitrine, where cards might be graded for quality, Sprite has included detailed information about the paintings as well as key references, functioning like physical metadata. The vitrines can also be flipped onto their sides and used as coffee tables. Collectors can even redeem just the vitrine. Or there is a book available to collect, designed by Sprite it describes the Sentimental Graffiti project in depth.

⁠The digital counterpart works are not just virtual representations of the nine foundational paintings, but are mischievously hidden within fictional online website spaces like galleries, auction houses and message boards. ⁠It’s a nod to the uneasy position of these artworks, both the digital and the physical layers, simultaneously inside and outside conventional art world constraints. And also to Sprite’s position as an artist who is finding ways to create art that traverse the old and the new, the digital and the physical, the here and now.
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⁠Folding together traditional art making with more powerful and omniscient technologies, Sprite gets at what it means to make images today.