Jonty Hurwitz

In a 2015, documentary by CNN International on Hurwitz's artwork, BBC Radio 2 art critic Estelle Lovatt commented on Hurwitz's work: "If Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today, he would have been doing what Jonty is doing. He would have been using algorithms. No one else works like him today. His art is the mix between the emotional and the intelligent, and that's what gives it that spark." Hurwitz's work focuses on the aesthetics of art in the context of human perception. His early body of sculpture was discovered by Estelle Lovatt during 2011 in an article for Art of England Magazine: "Thinning the divide gap between art and science, Hurwitz is cognisant of the two being holistically co-joined in the same way as we are naturally, comfortably split between our spiritual and operational self".

In late 2014, he released a series of "nano sculptures" under the title of ″Trust″. This series of works captured the attentions of both the scientific and art community, being cited by among others, Nature, Scientific American, Popular Science and Phys.org. In 2015, Hurwitz was elected a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. In 2016 the Royal Photographic Society selected a Scanning Electron Microscope photograph by Hurwitz and Stefan Diller as one of the top 100 'Royal Society International Images for Science'.

In 2014, Hurwitz pioneered a new sculptural technique in the field of Nanoart using multiphoton lithography and photogrammetry to create the world's smallest human portraits of his first love. The works of art were inspired by the nineteenth century marble sculpture of Cupid and Psyche by Antonio Canova, part of the permanent collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris. Hurwitz's works are so tiny that they are invisible to the human eye, able to be placed on the forehead of an ant. Smaller details of the works are at approximately the 300 nanometer scale, similar to the wavelengths of visible light and are therefore near impossible by the laws of physics to see in the visible spectrum. The only way to observe these works is through a non-optical method of magnification like a scanning electron microscope. To create these works Hurwitz collaborated with a team of over 20 people, including Stephan Hengsbach of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Yehiam Prior of the Weizmann Institute of Science, an art project centred in the world of academic physics. In February 2015, Hurwitz's sculpture "Trust" was awarded the world record for the "Smallest sculpture of a human" by the Guinness Book of Records.

In January 2013, Hurwitz's anamorphic work was described by the art blogger Christopher Jobson. In a short documentary about Hurwitz's "Generation Pi" philosophy by Vera Productions it is estimated that the sculpture received 20 million views online in the space of a few weeks. In early 2013 Hurwitz was introduced to the Savoy Hotel by London art agent Sally Vaughan. Hurwitz was commissioned to be Artist in Residence at the hotel and produce a sculpture of the hotel's historically iconic Mascot Kaspar the Cat. Hurwitz lived for several months in the hotel producing the sculpture.

In the same year, Hurwitz was also nominated for the Threadneedle Prize and exhibited a collection at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. By late 2013, in a special edition of Art of England on portraiture, Hurwitz was cited as the No. 1 portrait artist in the UK. In January 2014 Hurwitz was voted No. 46 in the top 100 artists of 2013 by the American art site, Empty Kingdom. In the same month, Hurwitz's anamorphic work was blogged as "The best of 2013" by the American Art and Culture magazine, Juxtapoz. In 2013 Hurwitz's work was also curated by Science Gallery International for a touring group show entitled 'Illusion' curated by Trinity College Dublin. The show presents a collection of installation artworks from around the world that affect human perception. The exhibition led to a 2014/2015 tour in the USA where it attracted over 170,000 visitors. The show then moved on to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2015 and Leipzig, Germany in 2016.

Hurwitz continues to commit much of his time to fintech startups while at the same time building up his body of artwork. In late 2011 Hurwitz backed Damian Kimmelman, to build a next-generation data provider Duedil. Duedil has since been dubbed "The Bloomberg of private companies" and has emerged as one of the key data providers in Europe and the UK. In 2011, Hurwitz seed funded the financial technology startup behalf.com. In 2012, Hurwitz backed the UK startup bank for young people: Meet Osper.

Hurwitz began producing sculptures in 2008. In 2009, his first sculpture 'Yoda and the Anamorph' won the People's Choice Bentliff Prize of the Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery. Later in 2009 he won the Noble Sculpture Prize and was commissioned to install his first large scale work (a nude study of his father called 'Dietro di me') in the Italian village Colletta di Castelbianco. In 2010, he was selected as a finalist for the 4th International Arte Laguna Prize in Venice, Italy.

Hurwitz has produced a body of work using both oblique (perspective) and catoptric (mirror) anamorphosis. In an interview with Christopher Jobson, Hurwitz explains his anamorphic inspiration as follows: "I have always been torn between art and physics. In a moment of self-doubt in 2008, I wandered into the National Portrait Gallery and stumbled across a strange anamorphic piece by William Scrots, a portrait of Edward VI from 1546. Followed shortly down the aisle by The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein from 1533. My life changed forever. I rushed home and within hours was devouring the works of M. C. Escher, Da Vinci and many more. In a breath I had found "brothers" in a smallish group of artists spanning 500 years with exactly the same dilemma as me. Within two months I was deep in production of my first work. My art rests on the shoulders of giants, and I am grateful to them." Anamorphosis as a form of art has a long history. A page in Leonardo Da Vinci's note book (folio 35 verso a of the Codex Atlanticus) shows two strangely elongated sketches of a child's head and an eye. These distorted and hesitant drawings, the first known anamorphoses, from around 1485". In the mid-18th Century anamorphosis was also used by Jacobite artists to secretly depict images of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the wake of brutal English censorship.

Hurwitz was co-founding Chief Technology Officer of Wonga.com in 2007 where he designed and built the first real-time online consumer loan system in the world. During this period, Wonga's technology won several awards (listed below). By 2011, Wonga had begun to attract criticism and Hurwitz, as the inventor of the technology, found himself with not enough influence to guide the now large company's use of his designs. After several attempts at changing Wonga's strategy, he resigned from his operational role in November 2011, and released his sculpture entitled Co-Founder.

In the mid-90s, Hurwitz arrived in London following his travels in India and got his first job researching financial data visualization for Gilbert de Botton, Chairman and Founder of Global Asset Management (GAM). During this period, he was exposed to de Botton's open architecture model of asset management. It was Jonty's close relationship with de Botton, also a major British art collector, that exposed him to the art world. The two maintained a close friendship until de Botton's death in 2000.

Over the years from 2000 to 2005, Hurwitz signed up a large base of asset managers for his reporting and analysis technology. In 2005, Hurwitz's company Delve was acquired by Alternative Investment Market listed company Statpro Group PLC (SOG). Hurwitz joined Statpro as Creative Director where he designed the first Cloud Computing analytics and risk platform for asset data. In 2008, Statpro launched its flagship product Statpro Revolution which was the result of this R&D. By 2014, eight out of the top ten largest asset managers in the world were Statpro Clients.

Hurwitz left Global Asset Management after two years forming his own company, Delve, to develop the R&D in data visualisation and reporting. Jonty's main client became de Botton himself. In 1996, GAM launched its financial reporting technology built by Hurwitz, which attracted attention in the financial media, winning several awards. Hurwitz's newly formed graphics and software team evolved over several years publishing several visualization projects (non-exhaustive list):

Jonty studied Electrical Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 1989 to 1993. His major was Signal Processing. He then joined the University of Cape Town Remote Sensing Group as a full-time researcher under Professor Michael Inggs, publishing a paper on radar pattern recognition.

Jonty Hurwitz (born 2 September 1969 in Johannesburg) is an artist, engineer and entrepreneur. Hurwitz creates scientifically inspired artworks and anamorphic sculptures. He is recognised for the smallest human form ever created using nano technology.