Brain of the Artist

Jochem Hendricks’s Brain of the Artist was created through a collaboration between the artist and Prof. Rainer Goebel, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, in Frankfurt, Germany. It is a 1:1 copy of Hendricks’s brain, based on an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan, output by a “stereo-lithography” computer printer. Hendricks—a conceptual artist who works in a range of media and methods—enjoys the fact that his brain is both the locus of the work’s original conception and also its literal, physical subject matter.