Beneath the Gold: Klimt in Motion

Viewfinder

Viewfinder invites you beneath the visible surfaces of Gustav Klimt’s iconic paintings revealed via modern scanning technologies and into Marcel Schwittlick’s generative reinterpretation.

In collaboration with the Belvedere Museum for their Pigment & Pixel exhibition, Schwittlick uses Klimt’s x‑rays, infrared, and scans as raw data, algorithmically animating them into brutally digital, interactive artworks. Permanently inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, Viewfinder bridges classical art and computational aesthetics, offering new insight into creation, decay, and reconstruction.

Supply

900

About the project

Viewfinder

Viewfinder is a transformative artistic collaboration between generative artist Marcel Schwittlick and the Belvedere Museum, presented as a part of their Pigment & Pixel exhibition. While Klimt’s paintings have long been admired for their surface opulence and symbolic motifs, modern imaging, such as x‑ray, infrared, and other scanning, allows us to see beneath the shimmering visible layers and into his working process.

Rather than simply reproducing what lies below, Schwittlick treats these scans as generative input. His algorithmic process extrapolates, fragments, and animates the hidden structures that reveal Klimt’s art in radical motion. The resulting works feel both precise and raw, an aesthetic fusion of scientific insight and aesthetic disruption.

By inscribing Viewfinder artworks as Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain, each piece becomes a living intersection of classical art history and generative digitization, archived beyond physical exhibitions and traditional archives.

Viewfinder repositions Klimt’s hidden visual data not as inaccessible footnotes but as generative material. It invites audiences to look again: into the unseen, into code, and into the possibility of reinterpreting the past through the procedural voice of the digital present.