Rafaël Rozendaal (Dutch-Brazilian, b. 1980) treats the internet as his canvas, making individual websites, each built around a unique domain name, as standalone artworks rendered in resolution-independent vector graphics that adapt to any screen size.,He began making art for the internet in 2000, at age 20, and lives and works in New York City.,
Both of his parents are artists, and he grew up drawing comics, photographs, collages and videos before his first web-based piece around 2000, in the collection of the net art pioneers JODI.He trained at the Academie Beeldende Kunsten in Maastricht, graduating in 2002.For his first decade online, Rozendaal worked mainly in Flash, and in 2002 he showed the piece Clouds in Whitneybiennial.com, an exhibition of Flash-based net art that hijacked the Whitney Biennial's domain name as part of the Neen movement.He later converted his Flash pieces to JavaScript with his coder Reinier Feijen, a process that took two to three years.He counts artists including Dan Flavin, James Turrell, Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp among his influences, and has called a 2008 Flavin retrospective in Paris one of the best exhibitions he has seen.
Rozendaal sells his websites as individual, exclusively owned artworks, each identified only by its domain name.In 2010 he founded BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), an open-source, itinerant one-night exhibition format in which artists bring their own projector.,It spread to 48 editions worldwide within its first year and was selected for the Internet Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale.In 2011 he wrote the Art Website Sales Contract to help other artists sell websites.,In later work he extended his browser-based practice into lenticular paintings, woven tapestries and haiku, describing the internet as “the universal library”, the place where even the most everyday thoughts get stored.,His lenticular paintings were shown in the 2025 group exhibition “Groundwork” at Heft Gallery.
In 2018 Rozendaal had “GENEROSITY”, his first solo exhibition in a public art institution anywhere, at the Towada Art Center in Japan, curated by Kodama Kanazawa.His work has also been shown at the Centre Pompidou, LACMA, the Whitney Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, the Valencia Biennial and on the screens of Times Square.,The Museum of Modern Art showed his work at monumental scale in its Agnes Gund Garden Lobby under the title “Light: Rafaël Rozendaal”, from November 2024 to September 2025.,In December 2025 the museum acquired seven of his works, including the website Shape Squeeze (2018) and six NFTs, donated by Fellowship Gallery.,
