Daniel Koeth (b. 1993)

Blue Sky #26, 2026
Photography, generative system
Dimensions variable, continuous duration

Blue Sky #26 is a single, continuously changing work built from one rule: on every day of 2026, Koeth photographs the sky. The year is his first as a full-time artist, and the photographs are the work’s only source material.

Each photograph is reduced to a measured field of color, and a seeded, divergence-free flow—a wind, in effect—carries those colors across the frame. New days enter as weather fronts; clear skies are given more weight than overcast ones; and because the state of the image is a function of time alone, it never arrives at a final frame. There is nothing to click. The work asks for the kind of attention the sky itself asks for.

The sky has been the constant in Koeth’s lens-based practice across photography and video, and the earlier Blue Sky photographs each hold a single day still. Blue Sky #26 belongs to a longer history of works made by returning to one subject on a fixed schedule—On Kawara’s date paintings, Byron Kim’s Sunday Paintings—but it replaces the archive with an instrument: the days are not catalogued, they are set in motion. It marks the point at which Koeth’s subject shifted from the image to the system that produces it.