In January of 2015, a Belgian court found the Antwerp-born painter Luc Tuymans guilty of plagiarism in his use of a photograph of the conservative politician Jean-Marie Dedecker taken by Katrijn van Giel for the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. The judgement imposed a fine of €500,000 if Tuymans were to create any more “reproductions” of Van Giel’s work or exhibits the original painting, currently owned by Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky.

Later that year, Christopher Meerdo produced an open invitation to his network of artists to directly appropriate and modify the photograph, lifted from van Giel’s website. The results are posted regularly to http://katrijnvangiel.tumblr.com/ with each work attributed to the participating artist.