This Painting Is Not Available In Your Country

How does an artwork spread on the Internet? We have often argued that an increasing amount of creative work is produced with the Web in mind. An urban intervention, for instance, is nice for the hundred passers-by who can touch it and feel it, but the real masses will be reached when it is getting blogged and shared on social media. Paul Mutant, the painter of ‘This Painting Is Not Available In Your Country’, decided to map how his artwork virally spread on the Internet, and turned the resulting visualization itself into an piece of art.

‘This Painting Is Not Available In Your Country’, which was created in 2010, addresses the place-boundedness of the Internet. We featured it in ‘From Digital To Real’, one of our ‘Top 10 Trends For 2011’ article series. Some months after we received an email from Paul Mutant himself, letting us know that we were featured in the exhibition around ‘This Painting Is Not Available In Your Country’ at Három Hét Galéria in Budapest, that ran in May and June.

The exhibition presented the orginal TPINAIYC artwork, as well as the results of Mutant’s mapping project — an impressive chronological graphic that shows how the work spread on the Internet across thousands of websites. Some of these websites were highlighted, and we are proud to be one of them. Thanks Paul! Click here for more photos of the exhibition in Budapest. Do you like Paul Mutant’s work? Become a fan on Facebook.