SEE SPOT PAINT

Agnieszka Pilat has become the Silicon Valley elite’s favorite artist. Even The Matrix’s Neo owns her work.

- SHAWN MCCREESH

WHEN I MEET Agnieszka Pilat, a pixie­ ish Polish émigré who has become the court painter of the potentates of Silicon Valley, she has just returned from Necker Island, the private Caribbean domain of Richard Branson. “I’m always the poorest person in the room” at places like that, she says with a laugh, curling her paint­flecked Yves Saint Laurent sneakers beneath her on the couch as she absentmindedly twists and untwists her hair. We’ve met up in her Chelsea studio, in which paintings of robotic limbs in repose dot the concrete walls. She has another studio in San Francisco. In each, she kennels a duplicate Spot, her 70­pound emergency­yellow cybernetic dog, muse, studio assistant (it paints, too), and, in some sense, protector, both on loan to her from Boston Dynamics, where she was once artist in residence.

Despite her Chelsea digs near the blue­chip Gagosians and Zwirners, Pilat does not have much of a reputation in the mainstream art world. She hasn’t been sought after in big biennials and isn’t owned by major museums, and the critics mostly ignore her. But the 48­-year-­old is beloved by a group of very well­off men—her collectors are mostly men—who don’t participate much in the art world and are likely turned off by its snobberies and sanctimonies. Instead, she puts Silicon Valley’s Ayn Rand–ian, futurist ideologies into paint. Her work can even be found, if you look carefully, decorating the sets of the new Matrix movie. And she’s definitely not being ironic about any of it.