DESIGNCOLLECTOR - Main Posts

Fries Vansevenant

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Fries Vansevenant builds portraits like puzzles, locking geometric shapes into a fixed portrait frame until a character emerges.

The Ghent-based digital collage artist works in a contemporary Cubist idiom, constructing iconic faces from flat planes and angular fragments. Each composition begins as a problem to solve — how to suggest a profile, a gaze, a recognisable silhouette using only geometric abstraction. The constraint of the fixed ratio becomes the engine of the work, forcing economy and precision.

The method crystallised with a portrait of The Joker, made after watching The Dark Knight for the thirty-fifth time. That piece became the foundation — flat 2D perspective, profile portraiture, and bold shape-building locked into place.

“Through my work, I don’t take you back to the past; instead, I show how it still walks alongside us.”

From that single experiment, a visual language emerged: pop culture figures rebuilt as graphic puzzles, nostalgia rendered in clean geometry.

@fries_vansevenant

Homage ISSEY MIYAKE 1992 Olympics Uniform

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:00:00 +0000

Studio Anatolik has resurrected a piece of Olympic design history—the Lithuanian national team uniform Issey Miyake originally created for the 1992 Barcelona Games.

The original commission came at a charged moment: Lithuania had just regained independence, and Miyake's designs were captured in promotional imagery shot by Irving Penn. An image of the uniform sat in Anatolik's reference archive for years before the studio began reconstructing it in 2018, revisiting the project through its own visual language.

What started as interest in an archival fashion object became a reflection on connection — a Japanese designer, a newly independent Baltic state, Games hosted in Spain — between countries, generations and creative disciplines.

Anatolik Belikov Studio is a Paris-based creative studio and CGI production house led by artist and director Anatolii Belikov. The studio creates distinctive imagery and films for luxury and premium brands, bringing a personal artistic perspective to each project.

anatolikbelikov.com

Pokras Lampas - Kazan Rooftop Calligraphy

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 21:44:47 +0000

Long time no Pokras. It’s been a while since our last encounter, and I am glad to cover his new giant piece again.

Pokras Lampas writes cities into existence — this time, in two languages at once.

The calligraphy artist has spent years scaling up letterforms to architectural proportions, but the rooftop of Barkli DAN Residence demanded something more than spectacle. Here, Russian and Tatar interweave across 177 square metres — three concepts, six words, two languages — each stroke a negotiation between heritage and horizon.

Three months of preparation, 14 days of painting. A 15-metre circle of contemporary Cyrillic calligraphy, read best from above — a message written for the sky, or perhaps for the city looking back at itself.

Artist: Pokras Lampas

Location: Kazan, Tatarstan

Project: Barkli DAN Residence rooftop mural

The ARTphabet by CESS

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:30:00 +0000

César Cid turns the alphabet into a gallery of borrowed worlds.

The Madrid-based 3D artist, working as CESS Studio, has built The Artphabet, a complete set of 26 letters, each a digital sculpture channelling the visual universe of a different celebrated artist. Mondrian's rigid geometry, Dalí's melting surrealism, Basquiat's raw urgency, and Kusama's infinite dots.

D DAMIEN HIRST.png G GAUDÍ.jpg N POLLOCK.jpg l lichenstein.jpg

What makes the project sing is Cid's refusal to simply texture a letter with someone else's style. Each character becomes a genuine object — form, colour, and material all transformed to inhabit that artist's world completely. The letter is merely the armature; the sculpture is the homage.

Z MUNCH.jpg T TAKASHI MURAKAMI.jpg U MATISEE.jpg V VANGOGH.jpg

Salvador Dali

F FRIDA.jpg Q BASQUIAT.jpg y yayoi kusama.jpg W WESSELMANN.jpg View More

Watercolours that refuse to behave by Robert Duxbury

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:35:00 +0000

Robert Duxbury paints watercolours that refuse to behave like watercolours.

The Melbourne-based painter works with brooding colour palettes and soft-edged figures that feel lifted from Pre-Raphaelite canvases, but the medium is watercolour on paper, pushed until it mimics the weight and depth of oil paint. The technique is deliberate collision: Chinese Gongbi discipline meeting European romanticism's emotional excess.

Duxbury spent years living in Guangdong Province, China, studying traditional ink wash and Gongbi painting through observation, museum visits, and trial and error. What stuck wasn't just the brushwork but the compositional logic: balance, negative space, the way a figure can float without grounding.

He carried that back to a studio practice built around introverted themes. The subjects are almost always beautiful youth — languishing, masked, morose — drawn from his own memories of that specific emotional intensity when self-awareness hits and the world becomes overwhelming. Vulnerability staged as apathy.

What surfaces are neither purely Eastern nor Western. The paintings hold the patience of Chinese technique and the melancholy of classical symbolism, but the execution is entirely his own, watercolour behaving like something heavier, something that shouldn't dissolve.

@robertduxburyart

Euwitt Nyanhongo

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:15:00 +0000

Euwitt Nyanhongo carves serpentine and opal with his hands, pulling figures from the same Nyanga mountains where his father taught him to see.

The son of Claude Nyanhongo, one of the pioneers of Zimbabwean stone sculpture, Euwitt began shaping rock at twelve, often finishing his father's works during school holidays. Now based between Zimbabwe and Cambridge, he sources Springstone, Lapidolite, Leopard Rock and Nyanga serpentine directly from the mountains where he was raised.

The process is unmediated. No power tools, no preliminary moulds. Nyanhongo works the stone by hand until figures emerge: humans, animals, spirits drawn from Shona mythology and the natural world. The material dictates as much as the sculptor does.

What surfaces are neither purely traditional nor contemporary? The sculptures carry the weight of their origin — geological and ancestral - while remaining unmistakably his own.

@euwittnyanhongo

Armageddon, Augusto De Luca

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:15:00 +0000

Neapolitan photographer Augusto De Luca (b. 1955) treats shadow not as absence, but as a scalpel. His black-and-white work operates on a principle of subtraction — light reveals, but shadow carves away, giving the image its depth and its metaphysical weight.

“Light enhances but its shadow deletes, thus giving the picture its depth, its third dimension and its subtractive properties.”

— Augusto De Luca

De Luca's pursuit is the distillation of images into their essential units: shapes, signs, the geometry of what remains after everything unnecessary has been cut away. His photographs sit at the border where rationality meets fantasy, where the decisive instant captures something fleeting yet somehow permanent.

The Naples-based artist spent decades refining this visual philosophy, moving from Hasselblad medium-format film to digital, whilst maintaining his signature square format — a frame that demands compositional discipline. His sculptural and architectural subjects become studies in what light chooses to show and what darkness chooses to take.

Learn more

Windows by Dave Krugman

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:15:00 +0000

Dave Krugman finds company in lit windows.

The Brooklyn-based street photographer has spent years wandering New York after dark, drawn to the glowing rectangles that punctuate the city's facades. His project WINDOWS // NYC captures these domestic portals — cat beds pressed against glass, curtains half-drawn, holiday decorations still hanging in February — each one a fragment of someone else's existence made briefly visible.

"New York, despite being so densely populated, can often be a lonely place. By documenting the individuality and variation of these windows, and then sequencing them into randomised grids, we're able to recreate the sense of belonging and sonder that one feels while wandering the storied streets of this beautiful metropolis."

“Sonder”, the vertiginous awareness that every stranger carries a life as complex as your own. Krugman's grids transform isolated glimpses into something collective. A hundred windows become a hundred lives, and suddenly the loneliest city feels like a neighbourhood.

On June 16th, a multilayered, interconnected city of light and shadow, powered by Transient Labs Studio is going to be released as NFT collection.

Follow Up Artist

Ferrari Luce by Jony Ive

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:10:00 +0000

Ferrari has revealed Luce — its first electric vehicle and, perhaps more radically, its first five-seater. The collaboration with Jony Ive's agency LoveFrom marks a significant departure from decades of brand tradition, yet the numbers remain unmistakably Ferrari: four electric motors, 1,050 horsepower, 0–100 km/h in 2.5 seconds.

The design language walks a careful line between evolution and revolution. Luce translates to "light" in Italian — an apt name for a machine promising 530 km of range while carrying the weight of Maranello's legacy into unfamiliar territory.

Sasha Mingia’s Mingialand in Paris

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:46:00 +0000

Learning to see a city that doesn’t yet see you back: Sasha Mingia’s Mingialand in Paris

There is a particular kind of loneliness that belongs to the early years of migration — not dramatic, not loud, but stretched thin across everyday gestures. In Mingialand in Paris, Sasha Mingia turns this condition into a visual language, constructing a city that feels at once intimate and unreachable.

The project unfolds as a sequence of photographs paired with diary fragments written on the same days the images were taken. This temporal proximity matters. The work does not reconstruct memory retrospectively; instead, it captures perception in its raw, unstable state — before it has settled into narrative. What we encounter is not Paris as a fixed cultural symbol, but Paris as it is being learned, misread, and slowly internalised.

Notably, there are no people in these images. The absence is not incidental — it becomes structural. The city appears emptied out, suspended, almost waiting. Streets, facades, fragments of architecture and passing light form a kind of emotional topography, where the usual social density of Paris is replaced by a quieter, more private tension. The viewer is left alone with the surfaces, just as the artist is left alone with the city.

In this sense, Mingia resists the familiar photographic trope of Paris as spectacle. There are no monuments asserting themselves, no romanticised clichés. Instead, the camera lingers on what might otherwise be overlooked: transitional spaces, peripheral details, moments that do not announce their significance. These images do not try to “capture” the city — they register the difficulty of entering it.

The accompanying texts operate not as captions, but as parallel traces of experience. They do not explain the images; rather, they echo them, sometimes drifting away, sometimes sharpening their emotional charge. Together, image and text form a fragmented, non-linear narrative — one that mirrors the disorientation of displacement. Meaning is not given; it accumulates slowly, through repetition and subtle shifts.

What emerges is a kind of private cartography. Mingialand in Paris maps not geography, but perception — the gradual transformation of an unfamiliar environment into something that can be inhabited, even if only partially. The city becomes a medium through which questions of identity, belonging, and self-recognition are negotiated.

Photography, here, functions less as documentation and more as translation. Mingia does not simply photograph Paris; she translates it into her own visual and emotional language. In doing so, she also exposes the limits of that translation — the gaps, the hesitations, the moments where meaning slips. These gaps are not failures; they are precisely where the work becomes most resonant.

There is also a quiet resistance embedded in the project. By refusing spectacle and focusing on solitude, Mingia shifts attention away from the city as an object of consumption and towards the subjectivity of the one who looks. The work insists on a slower, more vulnerable form of seeing — one that acknowledges uncertainty rather than masking it.

Ultimately, Mingialand in Paris is not about Paris in any conventional sense. It is about the fragile process of constructing a relationship with a place that does not yet feel like yours. It is about learning how to look when recognition is not guaranteed. And perhaps most importantly, it is about the moment when observation begins to turn into belonging — not as a resolved state, but as a quiet, ongoing possibility.

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Elizabeth Hibbard Photography

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:15:00 +0000

Elizabeth Hibbard photographs the emotional architecture between mothers and daughters.

Now based in Los Angeles, Hibbard builds images where family portraiture and constructed scene collapse into one unstable space. Her practice moves through family, gender, performance, psychoanalysis, and the body, asking how photography can mirror the hidden structures that shape intimacy and identity.

Hibbard is interested in what remains outside the frame of the "happy" snapshot. In her work, the camera does not simply record memory. It exposes the pressure beneath it: the roles we inherit, the scripts we repeat, the way femininity is learned through daily gestures and private rituals. Spontaneity and control meet in the same image, giving her photographs a tension that feels both tender and unnerving.

“I grew up alone with her from a young age until college, and we had a very isolated, boundary-less relationship; I didn’t often feel that we were truly separate people in many ways until much later.”

Hibbard's images sit exactly on that line between closeness and separation. They stage personal history without resolving it, allowing the viewer to feel how memory, body, and family mythology continue to perform through the present.

Elizabeth Hibbard

Ala Southiick

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 18:20:00 +0000

Ala Southiick draws what she sees, where she sees it. The Serbian illustrator and environmental artist works in plein-air: sketchbook open, pen moving, catching street life as it passes.

Her technique is rooted in speed and presence. Quick observational drawings capture characters, animals, and the quiet dramas of public space before they dissolve. The method demands a certain surrender: no corrections, no second passes, just the line and the moment.

Southiick documents her outdoor sketching workshops on TikTok, filling page after page with the faces and creatures she encounters on location or showing the process of quick sketching. The sketchbooks become a kind of visual diary, not polished, not precious, but alive with the texture of being somewhere specific.

Follow Ala Southiick

Glass hammers by Pia Hinz

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:15:00 +0000

Pia Hinz builds hammers that could shatter at a touch.

MARTEAU, 2024

The German-born sculptor Pia Hinz (b. 1991) works in stained glass, not windows, but objects. Screws, traffic cones, scythes, and shopping carts. Tools and labour symbols rendered in coloured glass segments joined by visible metal lines, their industrial purpose intact but their material logic inverted.

SCREW, 2025

The tension is deliberate. These are objects built for pressure, for grip, for repetition, now frozen in a medium that threatens to break under the slightest force. A hammer that cannot strike. A rope that cannot pull.

LUMEN, 2024

Light does the rest. It passes through the coloured surfaces and casts tinted reflections onto nearby walls and floors, extending each object beyond its physical boundaries. The sculptures occupy more space than they should, fragility expanding where force once concentrated.

CHAINE, 2025

Hinz works between Amsterdam, Arles, and Ardèche, moving traditional stained glass technique out of the ecclesiastical context and into the territory of the everyday. The sacred window becomes a tractor door.

LIKE A BULL IN CHINASHOP, 2019

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Giuseppe Lo Schiavo: Between Worlds

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:35:00 +0000

Giuseppe Lo Schiavo makes art about the spaces between — water and air, body and simulation, the visible and what refuses to be seen.

The Milan and London-based visual artist works across synthetic photography and bronze sculpture, but the medium matters less than the territory he maps. His work circles threshold states — those liminal moments where one thing becomes another, where boundaries dissolve into possibility.

In ROTTA, his series of larger-than-life bronze dolphins, Lo Schiavo casts these creatures as guides between worlds. Dolphins exist at the border of water and air, ancient symbols of passage and transformation. One sculpture bears the phrase 'L'arte non serve a niente' inscribed along its back — art serves no purpose — a provocation carried on a body built precisely for navigating the in-between.

“They are threshold figures, between water and air, fire and water, between the visible and the invisible. They emerge as guides, as presences that offer direction.”

— Artist

For their collaborative exhibition L'Aria Aveva Una Forma — staged on Capri — Lo Schiavo joins Anton Alvarez in a liminal territory where two practices converge from opposite yet complementary directions. Lo Schiavo moves through photography and digital manipulation; Alvarez through physical, process-driven sculpture. Together they circle the same question: can emptiness take form?

He continues this approach with new fine art prints, including Helios Circle, the Ocean, and Synesthesia at Sunset. The pieces are printed on archival cotton paper in editions of 8+3 AP, with works reaching 165×122 cm — a scale that demands the synthetic image hold up to sustained looking. series approaches the same obsession from another angle, framing psychological boundaries, emptiness treated not as absence but as structure.

The concept anchors itself in perception. What we dismiss as void is, in fact, crossed by forces, memories, and invisible tensions. The air between two bodies. The pause before contact. Both artists translate this into material terms, one through image, one through object, and the exhibition becomes the space where those translations meet.

Follow up artist Giuseppe lo Schiavo

Sad Girls by Glam Beckett

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:15:00 +0000

We've followed Glam since her first NFT project, Sad Girls Bar, went viral in 2021 with nearly $8M in volume.

Beckett draws what lingers after the party ends. The London-based illustrator works exclusively in black ink, building worlds where sadness wears its finest clothes and ennui poses like it knows you're watching.

Her monochrome compositions explore the space between beauty and darkness, romantic, erotic, heavy with nostalgia for things that may never have existed. The absence of colour is the point. Black and white strips away distraction, leaving only the emotional core: longing, melancholy, the glamour of feeling too much.

“I realised how empty and meaningless that work felt to me. I longed to create something that held real value and personal meaning. That’s when I made the decision to fully dedicate myself to art. And it turned out you don’t really need art education to become an artist.”

— Glam Beckett

Follow up artist Glam Beckett

Tallulah Dirnfeld Art

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:15:00 +0000

Tallulah Dirnfeld paints the violence hidden inside being good.

The Los Angeles oil painter works in soft pinks and creams, the palette of girlhood bedrooms and ballet recitals, yet what emerges from these tender colours is something far more unsettling. Faceless figures in uniform, chrome horses frozen mid-gallop, severed braids arranged like relics, her canvases stage performed goodness as a kind of theatre in which the audience never quite knows whether they're watching devotion or dissection.

Her series "I Was Always Good" centres on the distortion that occurs when childhood memories age. Nostalgia, trauma, comfort, and fear mutate together into something both tender and threatening. The deliberate blurring in her technique mirrors this - precision giving way to soft surrealism, as if the paintings themselves are forgetting.

“Being beloved means being idealised, and being fully known is typically the price paid. It has a sharpness, almost a violent quality, along with tenderness. The beloved is exalted and even worshipped, but therefore distorted.”

— Tallulah

Follow up artist Tallulah Dirnfeld

Floaters by Dima Rebus

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:15:00 +0000

Dima Rebus paints with ice that strangers send him from around the world.

The process begins before he touches a brush. Contributors (or as Rebus calls them, “floaters”) across the globe collect water samples — from parks, alleyways, abandoned buildings — and mail them to his studio. Rebus freezes each sample with watercolour pigments, then lets it melt onto paper. The ice dictates the first layer: unpredictable blooms, mineral traces, the ghost of a place he's never been. Others arrive carrying contamination, political residue, ecological unrest — water as document as much as material.

Only then does he enter the abstract field with figurative imagery, responding to what the water left behind.

Nearly every sample arrives with a letter. Place, mood, memory, time — the contributors become co-authors before Rebus makes a single mark.

Follow up artist Dima Rebus

mcbess - Alice

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

A talented person has many gifts. So does Matthieu Bessudo, whom we’ve been following for ages under mcbess moniker. Besides his extensive illustration work, Matthieu composes music and songs under the name Mcbaise.

Alice is a leading song from his “Wrongderful” album. I deliberately put this animation on the main page rather Music section because it belongs here. Worth mentioning, this video generally takes about six months of painstaking illustration work by talented Nicolas Macia under McBess ' direction.

“There’s a place for you to find
Let it bloom your mind”

— Mcbaise on "Alice"

P.s. This is Alice as a vinyl toy you will fall in love directly. Figure works as a night lamp, you better check yourself on mcbess store.

Gregorio Zanardi

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:05:00 +0000

Something is striking about Gregorio Zanardi’s work. Born in Argentina in 2000, he’s barely in his twenties, yet the emotions in his paintings and digital pieces feel as deep as if he’d spent decades on them. That clash of youth with old-soul feeling may be the point.

Zanardi's work is most steady in portraiture, especially of older faces. These portraits aren't idealised or sentimental. They show weathered, thoughtful people with something unresolved. Wrinkled skin, eyes turned inward. Zanardi chooses faces society often ignores and puts them front and centre with blunt intensity. This follows a Latin American figurative tradition. Artists like Antonio Berni or León Ferrari used human presence as resistance, and Zanardi, whether intentionally or not, continues that line.

What separates him from simple melancholy portraiture is tension. One can describe his practice as a deliberate collision between beauty and unease, and you feel it. Harmonious compositions that carry a current of discomfort just beneath the surface. An imperfectly rendered face with something slightly off in the gaze. The work doesn't let you settle.

Worth following across NFT Platforms, and worth keeping an eye on his physical work, which you suspect may be where the most interesting surprises are still to come.

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Richard Nadler

designcollector@gmail.com (Arseny Vesnin) — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:00:00 +0000

Richard Nadler is an artist whose work is based on close observation and personal stories. His work is shaped by his father's influence, especially his lifelong love of textiles and craftsmanship - from antique Persian rugs to worn watches and handmade leather shoes.
Nadler's aesthetic belief is that surfaces hold time and closeness, and that objects carry human experience. His work links traditional craft values with contemporary digital art.

Nadler focuses on showing unseen layers of life through rooms and halls. Instead of people, he paints empty spaces as a "vacuum of presence" that feels lived-in by placing marks, textures, and light. This choice shows how memory and feeling live in places. He turns homes into stages of personal moments as joy, grief, laughter, silence and made visible by careful detail and mood. His work mixes documentary observation with poetic interpretation.

The artist works with materials both digital and physical, exploring time and handmade skill. By offering his pieces as NFTs and as embroidered versions, Nadler contrasts the instant nature of digital work with the slow, meditative pace of embroidery.

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