On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, the Neue Nationalgalerie presents an interactive installation by the artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann). The work marks a new phase in Beeple’s practice, expanding his engagement with artificial intelligence and digital culture into a fully immersive physical–digital hybrid environment with robotics. Through anthropomorphic figures of animals bearing the heads of globally recognizable personalities, Beeple creates a sociopolitical allegory of contemporary power structures. With this presentation, Beeple’s work is shown in Germany for the first time.

Regular Animals consists of autonomous robotic dogs moving freely within a pen-like enclosure. Each robotic figure is fitted with a hyper-realistic silicone head modelled after prominent contemporary figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple himself. As the robots roam the space, they capture images of their surroundings through onboard cameras. These images are processed by AI systems that reinterpret the data according to the cultural, artistic, or ideological “style” associated with each figure.

The robots then physically produce printed images—ejected from their rear ends—transforming algorithmic interpretation into tangible output. All of these prints are distributed free of charge to visitors. Through this deliberately literal system of observation, digestion, and output, Beeple offers a pointed commentary on how contemporary perception is shaped by algorithms and technology platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk own algorithms that control what we see and decide how we see the world. When they want to make a change, they don’t have to lobby the UN, they don’t have to go to congress, they just make a change.

Beeple

 Regular Animals explores how meaning, authorship, and cultural value are increasingly mediated by invisible technological infrastructures. It was first shown at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 and now comes to the Neue Nationalgalerie as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, expanding its engagement with audiences beyond the fair context.

The exhibition in the lower foyer of Neue Nationalgalerie is open to the public free of charge.

The Artist Beeple

Beeple (born Mike Winkelmann, 1981) is an US-American artist known for his large-scale immersive installations and his long-running project Everydays, through which he has created and published a new digital artwork every day since 2007. His work combines 3D modelling, AI, animation, and satire to reflect on contemporary culture, technology, politics, and consumerism. Beeple gained international recognition for bringing digital art into the art market, most notably with the record-breaking NFT sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a landmark digital collage sold at Christie’s in 2021 for $69 million. His practice explores the intersection of art, media, and new technologies, challenging traditional boundaries of authorship and exhibition. With Regular Animals, Beeple extends his long-standing engagement with technology, culture, and satire—this time in a physical–digital hybrid installation.

References on Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol

Displayed alongside Regular Animals is Nam June Paik’s Andy Warhol Robot (1994), offering a historical counterpoint to Beeple’s work. As one of the earliest pioneers of video and media art, Paik assembled the human-like robotic figure from television sets, film cameras, and tape reels, embedding moving images of Warhol’s work into its body. Both artists invoke Andy Warhol as a pivotal reference point, recognizing in him a figure who epitomized the convergence of art, mass media, celebrity culture, and mechanical reproduction—an enduring framework through which Nam June Paik and Beeple each examine how technological systems shape authorship, image production, and cultural power in their respective eras. While Paik transformed mass media into sculptural form, Beeple extends this legacy into the age of AI, algorithms, and decentralized networks—highlighting a continuity of artistic inquiry into technology, and mass media.

Team

Beeple. Regular Animals is curated by Lisa Botti, curator at Neue Nationalgalerie.

Curatorial Assistant: Ricarda Bergmann
Exhibition Manager: Anna Viehoff
Conservator: Hana Streicher, Paulina Potel
Communication and Marketing: Markus Farr, Maribel Nicolás Cabello
Educational Programme: Felicitas Fritsche-Reyrink 

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin