Morgan Buck Sees A.I. as a Rare Chance to Reimagine Creativity

Morgan Buck, We’re the Only Winners, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 31 inches. Photo: Mario Gallucci; Courtesy the artist and ILY2

These days, Morgan Buck doesn’t make paintings that look like paintings. With their airbrushed surfaces and grainy, digitized haze, his canvases look like screenshot shitposts pulled from the weirder corners of the internet—and I mean that in the best way possible. Buck doesn’t do lazy nods to digital culture, and his work is meticulously crafted. His recent solo show, “Instantly & Effortlessly,” at ILY2 in New York—the artist’s second with the gallery—demonstrated just how far he’s willing to go in his engagement with the visual detritus of our algorithm-fed lives, marrying the deliberate labor of painting with junk images in something that shines a light on the promises and the pitfalls of both.

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Here’s where I should probably cop to personally loving the weirder corners of the internet, where Buck’s process begins. He scavenges screenshots, video captions, A.I. outputs and stock imagery, manipulates them digitally and uses them as raw material for paintings that are at once funny and deeply uncanny—think deep-fried memes, but more refined. Buck riffs on themes of attention, automation and absurdity while grounding each piece in the technical rigor of photorealistic airbrushing.

It’s shitposting with a twist: conceptually agile, technically sophisticated and, like the best absurdist memes, sneakily moving. There’s humor and a sense of depravity, along with a real tension between image and object, intention and accident, meaning and nonsense. Some of Buck’s paintings draw you in with their oddness and keep you there with an undercurrent of melancholy. Others are just plain fun to look at.

Buck can be as irreverent as his paintings suggest, but while he talks about his practice with a casual bravado, there’s an undercurrent of disciplined artistic self-awareness that comes through when he talks about his work. He is, you might say, serious about not being too serious. His paintings are smart without being didactic, technically impressive without being self-important and prompt questions about how we engage with both art and the internet. His work is the most fully realized—and amusing—blurring of high and low culture I’ve seen in a long time, and I caught up with Buck as “Instantly & Effortlessly” was closing to talk about artificial intelligence in the arts, the allure of the airbrush and painting with a sense of humor.

The title of your exhibition “Instantly & Effortlessly,” which closed at........

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