The story 31 July 2026
They Let the Public Repaint the Rijksmuseum
Google Pixel opened the Dutch national collection to anyone with an idea and an AI tool. A man in Bucharest won it with an altarpiece.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds some of the most reproduced paintings in the world. Google Pixel, working with the museum's main partner KPN and the agency Artcrush, invited the whole of the Netherlands to take those masterpieces and make something else out of them — using Google's own AI tools to do it.
The results are the reason this is worth looking at rather than reading about. A Rembrandt-era gentleman lit not by a candle but by the screen of a phone. A woman in a starched lace ruff, face underlit in cold blue. Three figures from a Golden Age canvas restaged in the orange of the Dutch national kit. Tulip gardens overrun by a visible grid, as though the painting were still loading.
The open call ran until February and the winner was announced at the museum in March: Dragoș Bădiță, from Bucharest, for a piece called Altarpiece — a reworking of The Holy Kinship by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, a painting from around 1495.
The winning entries did not stay online. They went up on more than three thousand digital billboards across the Netherlands, and hung in a gallery directly opposite the Rijksmuseum itself — the remixes facing the originals across the street.
Why it mattersMuseums have spent a decade putting collections online and asking people to look. This asked them to make something instead, and then gave the results the same wall space as the source.
More museums and archives in Culture →
Sources: The FWA — Google The Pixel Exhibit · Baaz — Google Pixel x KPN x Rijksmuseum · Marketing Report — the winning entry
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