Beeple’s Robo-Dogs depicting Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, first seen at Art Basel Miami in December, head to the Neue Nationalgalerie, a Mies van der Rohe-designed building in Berlin.
Their debut at the fair went viral immediately and sold out at $100,000 a pop during the VIP opening. Now, Beeple’s Regular Animals, a pack of robotic dogs wearing the faces of tech billionaires, dead artists, and the artist himself, are heading to Berlin. April 29 to May 10, for eleven days. Expect queues.
The Neue Nationalgalerie is a perfect venue for this installation. A genuinely strange imagining for these bots who will be paddling across the polished granite floor, printing photographs from their rear ends onto one of Modernism’s most revered pieces of architecture. Beeple, to his credit, probably finds that funny.
The dogs, ten of them, each an edition of two, also bear the faces of Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple himself, among others. Each one roams the gallery using built-in cameras and AI to photograph visitors, processes those images through a visual filter keyed to its particular face. Picasso’s output arrives fragmented into cubist planes; Musk’s, in stark patent-drawing black-and-white, then ejects the prints, free of charge, from its back end. The scatological joke is deliberate and not especially subtle, but it lands. These are systems that consume what they see and automatically produce content. The commentary writes itself, which is also the point.
Mike Winkelmann, AKA Beeple, from Wisconsin, made his name by effectively rewriting the standard art career narrative. The $69 million Christie’s sale of Everydays: The First 5,000 Days in 2021 was one of those market moments that split opinion almost perfectly along generational lines. Since then, the institutional recognition has followed: a dialogue with Francis Bacon at the Castello di Rivoli and a Hans Ulrich Obrist-curated survey in Nanjing. Berlin is his first presentation in Germany.
Lisa Botti, the museum’s curator behind the show, has been clear about why an institution of this kind should be doing this at all. Technology, she’s argued, is reshaping politics, economics, identity, and collective reality, and yet it remains strangely peripheral to most traditional cultural conversations. Museums, in her view, can’t stay outside that. It’s a reasonable position. The more interesting question is whether Regular Animals actually engages with it or illustrates it with better production values than most.
There’s a companion piece that helps. Nam June Paik’s Andy Warhol Robot from 1994 — on loan from the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg — will be in the room alongside Beeple’s pack. Paik built his figure from television screens, film cameras and a Brillo box, with moving images of Warhol’s work embedded in its body. The pairing is sharp. What both artists understood about Warhol is that he grasped, earlier than almost anyone, that art and mechanical reproduction and media weren’t separate things to be negotiated against each other — they were one thing. Beeple adds AI to that argument and arrives, more or less, at the same place.
The show opens as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, with a conversation on April 28 featuring Botti and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who curated the Castello di Rivoli presentation. All works on view are loans from Beeple’s studio.
What the installation is actually asking — and this is where it gets more interesting than the viral photographs suggest — is something about the direction of looking. We go to galleries to look at things. These things look back, filter what they see through someone else’s visual logic, and hand you a picture of yourself as the output. Surveillance dressed as portraiture. Or portraiture that’s honest about what it always was. The dogs don’t care either way. They keep moving.
The installation is scheduled to be on display during Berlin Gallery Weekend at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin from April 29 to May 10, 2026