Artist Sneaks Framed A.I. Portrait and Accompanying Label Onto a Museum's Gallery Wall

The A.I.-generated image hung in Wales’ National Museum in Cardiff for a few hours before staffers and museumgoers noticed its presence

Ella Feldman - Daily Correspondent

November 17, 2025 10:01 a.m.

Wales' National Museum in Cardiff, where an artist quietly hung an A.I.-generated work on a gallery wall in October Huw Fairclough / Getty Images

In late October, a visitor to Wales’ National Museum in Cardiff asked museum staff about a peculiar image hanging on a gallery wall, only to discover that nobody on staff knew how the image had gotten there.

The visitor “quickly realized that this was a guerrilla piece,” they tell BBC News’ Anaba Khan.

On October 29, an artist known as Elias Marrow affixed a framed print and an accompanying label on a wall in the museum’s contemporary art gallery, where it was on view for several hours before staff intervened, per the Art Newspaper’s Gareth Harris.

Titled Empty Plate, the print was generated by artificial intelligence, and it shows a young boy in a school uniform clutching a book and an empty plate. The label described it as a “digital print on paper, custom-made frame” that was “on loan from the artist.”

A museum spokesperson tells BBC News that the print was placed “without permission” on the gallery wall. “We were alerted to this and have removed the item in question,” the spokesperson adds.

On his website, Marrow describes the boy in Empty Plate: “It is unclear whether he waits to be fed, punished or simply forgotten.” The idea came to him last year, when he was making sketches connected to hunger and poverty in the United Kingdom and Wales—“subjects close to my heart,” he explains to Hyperallergic’s Rhea Nayyar in an email.

The artist hung the work at the National Museum to explore “how public institutions decide what’s worth showing, and what happens when something outside that system appears within it,” he tells BBC News.

Marrow sketched the image first, then used an A.I. tool to complete it. “A.I. is here to stay,” he says to BBC News. “To gatekeep its capability would be against the beliefs I hold dear about art.”

Quick fact: Can artificial intelligence help art historians?

Researchers are hoping that A.I. will be able to virtually recreate a lost mural by the 19th-century Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.

Not everyone is so keen on A.I.-generated art. The visitor who alerted staff about Empty Plate explains to BBC News that they had wondered “why such a poor quality A.I. piece was hanging there without being labeled as A.I.”

Generative A.I. has been at the heart of some of the art world’s biggest disputes in recent years. Artists, critics and scholars have debated whether A.I.-generated images should win competitions, hang in museums or even be considered art in the first place.

Lawyers have argued over whether A.I.-generated images infringe on the copyrights of artists whose work is used to train tools like DALL-E and Midjourney.

Marrow has staged similar stunts in the past. In July, he placed a painted brick in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, according to Artnet’s Margaret Carrigan. Around the same time, he also snuck a placard onto the wall at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

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