Richard Nadler: AI Art Meets Embroidery in Tactile Works

Richard Nadler, a Munich-based contemporary artist, creates AI-generated compositions that are translated into large-scale embroidered pieces by Maison Vangart in Lyon. His practice merges machine learning with traditional textile craftsmanship, producing works that feel both digital and tangible. Nadler left a banking career in London to pursue art, influenced by his painter grandparents and mother, and his father, an African art collector who took him to Japan. His 2023 collection 'Yamabushi Horizons' draws on Japanese mountain landscapes, while his 2025 series 'See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil' explores technology as both tool and cage. Nadler retrains a custom diffusion model for each series, emphasizing authorship over automation. The embroidered works, described as carrying 'painterly gestures, algorithmic structures, and material density,' emerged from viewers' instinct to touch his digital pieces. He cites Gerhard Richter as an influence and is currently working on larger architectural embroideries inspired by a New York exhibition, aiming to create human-scale pieces that reveal interior lives through millions of stitches.