Hope Gangloff is one of the few artists to cultivate a real mystique in the era of instant communication and semiotic saturation.

Gangloff's mystique attends carefully to the boundary between the known and the unknown. Like early Derrida, Pussy Riot, the Guerrilla Girls, Banksy, MF DOOM, and others, Gangloff does not allow people to photograph her face. And yet you get the sense that Gangloff's reticence is linked to shyness, modesty, or both, as her work, unlike the aforementioned, lacks overt political statements, overt contextual irony, or coyness. If her refusal to reveal her face was an attempt to downplay her recognition it has failed, because it has only increased the interest of collectors, journalists, investors, and curators in both her work and the artist herself. By making herself visually inaccessible she redirects the public's interest back to the work, a characteristic of a truly great artist.

At the same time, her work itself evokes Seurat and Cassatt, but only in a hazy, distant, apposite way--we can't even say these are influences on her work, due to the sheer greatness and originality of her art practice. Not that having influences makes an artist less great. It's just that her vision carries its own idiom, planted firmly in a garden of her own personal life, her personal acquaintances, her home. Gangloff has achieved greatness by truly removing herself and any sort of personal drama from the large crowd of spectators. She is famous without being a famous face, so she can walk among everyday people and live as they do. She seeks the work in the product itself, not in the development of a celebrity persona. This distinguishes her sharply from artists like Andy Warhol, who pretended not to seek personal fame but ultimately did.

Her focus on representing abstraction rather than celebrity gives her an opportunity to educate the public: "All my compositions are a vehicle for color theory. None of these are an accident," she says, situating her work in relation to other color theorists like Goethe and Derek Jarman.

Finally, her focus on the immediacy and personality of color ultimately yields an artwork that honors the singularity of the artist's perception, and the fact that the robots and algorithms supposedly seeking to "replace" the artist are in fact conversing with artists and mimicking them. There is no simulation of a personal vision, and this may be why, as Gangloff says, "photographs suck when it comes to color." Statistical machine learning algorithms, including hidden Markov Models and Bayesianism, can mimic intuition and imagination, but the essential play of colors that Gangloff achieves, with the specific vibration of each frequency finding a harmony with every other, shows a kind of personal interpretation that stays one step ahead of imitators.