Harm van den Dorpel Opens Left Gallery

Left Gallery—a visionary early nft-based playform, according to Casey Reas—was started by Harm van den Dorpel and Paloma Rodríguez Carrington. Van den Dorpel got the idea after this partner, Carrington, began working at Ascribe in 2015, the early NFT, which we touched on previously in the Timeline.

Van den Dorpel explained his motivations for creating Left Gallery on Outland:

“I thought this was interesting and something with great potential. If it worked for me, it could also work for other artists. I started asking around in my peer group—other artists whose work I felt was important but never had a connection to any art market. There was some possibility of financial success, but it was limited because the majority of people didn’t understand what the blockchain or a token was—the term NFT didn’t yet exist. It was then we started Left Gallery, to build a market and provide infrastructure for artists working with software.”

The gallery would go on to influence Casey Reas to create a2p (artist-to-peer) in 2019 and Feral File in 2020.