Robert Alice

Robert Alice is a London-based artist, curator, and writer described in their own studio materials as a trained art historian; no specific school, degree, or year of study is documented in public sources. Alice's practice examines blockchains and their histories, producing works that pair physical materials, including gold leaf, pigment, and acrylic on canvas, with an associated NFT and a linked hardware key.

Alice's best-known project, Portraits of a Mind, began in 2019 and consists of a large sequence of paintings, each titled with a geographic coordinate, that together encode the original Bitcoin source code. A work from the series, Block 21, sold at Christie's in New York for USD 131,200 on 7 October 2020, and is described by the artist's studio and by market commentators as the first sale of an NFT at a major auction house. In 2021 Alice curated Natively Digital at Sotheby's, the auction house's first NFT sale. In 2022 Alice co-produced the first academic conference on NFTs at the University of Oxford, and around the same period began work on On NFTs, a large-format art history of the medium commissioned by Taschen; the exact publication date could not be confirmed in the available sources. In 2023 Alice presented the solo exhibition Babel at the Monnaie de Paris, and in 2026 Alice is presenting a new project, SEAL, with Onkaos at Art Basel Hong Kong.

Public sources disagree on Alice's birth year. Sotheby's artist biography page states 1995, while a separate Sotheby's auction lot page and an Onkaos profile both state 1992, and no source supplies a precise birth date, so this profile treats the birth year as unconfirmed rather than guess between the two figures.

According to the artist's own studio materials, Alice's work has drawn attention from curators including Hans Ulrich Obrist and has been covered by outlets such as the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Art Newspaper, though this profile was not able to independently verify specific reviews or reproduce exact critical language. What can be independently confirmed is institutional uptake: Portraits of a Mind is now part of France's national collection, described by the artist's studio as held in part by the Centre Pompidou and the Bibliotheque Kandinsky at the Musee national d'art moderne, with additional works reported at the Monnaie de Paris and in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's digital collection. That institutional pattern, museums and national collections acquiring the work rather than only private collectors, is the strongest available signal of critical standing.

Robert Alice's auction market is concentrated in a small number of high-value sales tied to Portraits of a Mind. The current auction record is Block 1 (24.9472 N, 118.5979 E), which sold for USD 762,000 at Sotheby's in New York on 18 November 2025, an 18 percent rise over the previous record of USD 642,300 for Block 34 (51.895167 N, 1.4805 E), set at Sotheby's on 27 April 2022. Alice does not appear to work with a traditional gallery roster; the most consistent commercial partner is Onkaos, alongside direct sales through Christie's and Sotheby's.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Robert Alice, and authentication runs through the artist's studio together with the blockchain record attached to each physical work, so provenance research should treat both channels as part of verification. The auction history is short and concentrated in the Portraits of a Mind series, which means each new sale can move the recorded high substantially, as it did in 2025. Public biographical sources are inconsistent on basic facts such as the exact birth year, and this profile has left that field unconfirmed rather than adopt either published figure. Collectors should also note that the commercial structure differs from a conventional gallery-represented artist: the primary market partner, Onkaos, is a relatively young initiative, and much of the sales history runs directly through Christie's and Sotheby's rather than a private dealer network.