Two Wrestlers - Research and Development

Two Wrestlers - Vincent van Gogh NeoMasters™ Research and Development Vincent van Gogh’s 'Still life with meadow flowers and roses' (1886) is currently held in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, but hidden beneath the painting lies a secret work showing two wrestlers locked in combat. Vincent, in a letter to his brother Theo, in January 1886, wrote 'This week I painted a large thing with two nude torsos - two wrestlers … and I really like doing that', however the piece was never found. Only in 2012, when a team of researchers from TU Delft, Antwerp University, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum, performed x-ray studies, were the two wrestlers revealed. The motif is thought to have been painted by van Gogh whilst he was at the Antwerp Academy, and together with the documented reference of the painting in Vincent’s letters, the painting has been verified as an authentic van Gogh. As part of the development of our 3D printed Two Wrestlers NeoMasters™, we processed the x-ray Vincent van Gogh's Still life with meadow flowers and roses (1886) to separate the exterior and interior pieces, leaving only the trace of the hidden interior piece, revealing the outline of the hidden boxers. As part of this Research and Development piece we colourised using a GAN model the underlying processed x-ray of Vincent van Gogh's Still life with meadow flowers and roses. Subsequently edge detection, AI van Gogh stylisation, heightmap generation, and 3D printing were performed to generate lost work, the Two Wresters NeoMasters™, which was shown in 2022 at the Louvre, and received international media attention from The Times, ArtNet, The Independent, ITV, and the BBC. The physical piece has also been shown at Foster + Partners, London, 2023, and Deeep AI Art Fair, Paris, 2024. This Research and Development NFT piece is released a limited set of 100 editions.