left gallery was an online gallery I co-founded in Berlin in 2015 and ran until it closed in March 2022. It produced and sold works of art as downloadable objects: a file — an image, a video, a PDF, a font, a piece of software — published in a limited edition. Once purchased, the buyer received a cryptographic token as proof of ownership, while the file itself stayed theirs to keep, to copy, and to open with whatever software they liked.

It started from a plain observation: the works I was making were files, and the art world had no honest way to sell them. Rather than translating a file into an object, left gallery sold it as one.

It was also one of the earliest proto-NFT marketplaces: an online marketplace for blockchain-ascribed artworks, open two years before the ERC-721 standard existed and six before the art world learned the word NFT. The first editions were ascribed on Bitcoin through ascribe.io, later ones minted as ERC-721 tokens on Ethereum.

The gallery published work by artists including Rafaël Rozendaal and Viktor Timofeev, and took residence in institutions — among them Stroom Den Haag, for the exhibition "rite of access".

left gallery was an online gallery I co-founded in Berlin in 2015 and ran until it closed in March 2022. It produced and sold works of art as downloadable objects: a file — an image, a video, a PDF, a font, a piece of software — published in a limited edition. Once purchased, the buyer received a cryptographic token as proof of ownership, while the file itself stayed theirs to keep, to copy, and to open with whatever software they liked.
It started from a plain observation: the works I was making were files, and the art world had no honest way to sell them. Rather than translating a file into an object, left gallery sold it as one.
It was also one of the earliest proto-NFT marketplaces: an online marketplace for blockchain-ascribed artworks, open two years before the ERC-721 standard existed and six before the art world learned the word NFT. The first editions were ascribed on Bitcoin through ascribe.io, later ones minted as ERC-721 tokens on Ethereum.
The gallery published work by artists including Rafaël Rozendaal and Viktor Timofeev, and took residence in institutions — among them Stroom Den Haag, for the exhibition "rite of access".