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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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.

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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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Riona Buthello is a Manchester-based painter whose work explores memory, emotion, and shared experience. Painting has always been part of her life, an intuitive way she connects with herself and the world.

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Her practice is defined by a dreamy, nostalgic aesthetic, often described as painting collective memories with a pointillist touch. Soft, rain-blurred scenes, hazy light, and quiet atmospheres sit at the heart of her work, echoing moments that feel familiar yet just out of reach. Manchester’s grey skies and reflective streets play a central role in shaping its visual language. Feels like distant memories you are trying to focus on by squeezing your eyes.

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Working from her home studio, Buthello starts each painting with bold, expressive strokes, valuing energy and feeling over perfection. This instinctive method gives her work its movement and emotional depth.

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Younguk Yi (b. 1991) lives and works in Seoul, where his practice has been shaped by rigorous training at Dankook University and advanced degrees from Hongik University. The Hole gallery (run by Kathy Grayson) presented Mutant Lab, Younguk Yi’s first solo exhibition in New York this October, introducing a painter whose work sits somewhere between hallucination and clinical observation.

Yi fills pristine white grounds with figures mid-recombination: bodies double, splice, stack; eyes align like windows; flesh hardens into scaffold. These blank spaces act less as neutrality than containment—exam-room, lab-like zones where bodies are measured and watched. Trained in Seoul, Yi paints by repetition and distortion, using airbrush gradients that hover between vapour and solidity, then sharpened by hand into uncanny precision. The work reads almost digital yet is rooted in obsessive drawing and anatomical study—calibrated, controlled, and subtly unstable.

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Across the exhibition, bodies become stressed architecture, mirroring the speed and fragility of rapid modernisation. Collapsing grids and unstable structures suggest ambition, failure, and perpetual repair. In multiple rooms—choreographed wrestlers, trained dogs, yawning figures suspended in quiet absurdity—the paintings offer a dry, unsettling humour. Yi’s titles undercut solemnity, circling obedience, performance, and social anxiety, turning existential unease into sharp self-awareness. The work evokes science fiction not by other worlds but by revealing our own: a behavioral lab where gestures multiply and bodies proliferate while inner lives stay sealed and unknowable.

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For this edition, DRIFT presents Whispers, Unfold, and the new drone performance Wind of Change, all installed on Jubail Island’s tidal waterways and mangrove habitat.

Whispers animates a field of illuminated Guinea Grass, bending and glowing with the wind.

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Unfold reads a visitor’s heartbeat and blooms it into a unique audiovisual “digital flower.”

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Wind of Change lifts the experience into the sky with 2000 drones tracing shifting dunes, currents, and finally a glowing falcon dissolving into a vortex of light.

Manar Abu Dhabi, created by the Department of Culture and Tourism, continues expanding the city’s public art footprint with large-scale light sculptures and immersive interventions across its natural landscapes.

DRIFT’s practice has long explored the patterns and intelligence of nature through technology. These new works extend that dialogue into the open air of Abu Dhabi, where wind, water, and human presence become co-authors of the experience.

Canadian photographer Dina Goldstein, known for her cult series Fallen Princesses, returns with MISTRESSPIECES — a sharp, cinematic dive into art history’s most iconic women.

In ten large-scale photographs, Goldstein pulls figures from the canon — the Madonnas, the muses, the myths — and drops them into today’s world of climate anxiety, AI mimicry, and quiet displacement. Each tableau feels like a scene from a darkly funny film that never existed: part Renaissance, part reality TV, entirely unsettling.

Goldstein has always used satire as a mirror, and here she turns it toward the history of the gaze itself. For centuries, male artists idealized the female form — Botticelli’s softness, Titian’s glow, Ingres’s precision — shaping beauty through desire. MISTRESSPIECES flips that script. These women are no longer passive subjects; they occupy the frame with full agency, confronting both the painter and the viewer.

What emerges is not just a retelling of art history, but a reclamation — a gallery of heroines reborn in a world they never asked to inherit.

Dark Tales

17-21 October, 2025

In the heart of the Creative Quarter in Folkestone, at Eight Squared Gallery, there was Dark Tales, a contemporary art exhibition. Curator Irina Naumova invited six women artists to reflect on tales that continue to be told in modern society. The curator's idea was to reimagine the fairy tale as a personal mythology through different media. Featured photographs, paintings and objects represented beauty, nostalgia and self-expression.

In every darkness, there’s a light when the artist speaks. By reinterpreting the idea of the fairy tale as a timeless landscape of the mind, this exhibition aimed to showcase the bright voices of contemporary art that diminish the distinction between dream and myth, memory and imagination. 

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Natalia Alekna creates multifaceted collages with self-assertive women at the centre of the composition

Varvara Burtseva’s collage shows whimsical creatures that came from medieval times and were carefully brought into the contemporary context.

Natasha Antipova-Kaploukhaya shows her work with a man in a bright costume as if he came directly from a movie or a tale.

Daria Atamanovskaya proclaims a multi-layered statement about youth, femininity and post-Soviet melancholy. A bold play with the past, gender stereotypes and fashionable images in the featured photograph.

Gwen Grynfeld’s art practice runs through physical theatre, puppetry and painting. This show displays work on canvas about the resurrection of women's power.

Iryna Yauseyenka’s goats are fairy-tale creatures with detailed costumes and accessories.

Dark Tales at Eight Squared Gallery

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Accidental Landscapes is a digital painting series created by artist Mohammad Noureddini reflect on the hidden aesthetics of discarded matter. Everyday waste, scaffolding, plastic sheets, and heaps of rubbish are reinterpreted through painterly form, becoming a stage for light, rhythm, and unexpected beauty.

The works investigate the tension between ecological collapse and visual composition. By reframing debris and abandoned structures as subjects of painting, the series questions where the boundary lies between beauty and ugliness, attraction and unease. While the paintings may appear visually striking, they remain rooted in discarded matter. The tension lies in their duality, what might momentarily look beautiful is, in the end, still waste, a reminder of our culture’s excess and neglect.

Rather than portraying rubbish as detritus, the series treats it as an involuntary archive of culture: its patterns, its accumulation, its forgotten weight. Each composition balances aesthetic pleasure with confrontation, drawing the viewer in with painterly colour and form while refusing to let the subject escape its environmental resonance.

Ultimately, Accidental Landscapes is an inquiry into perception. It asks: What hidden narratives exist within discarded things? How do these overlooked forms shape our cities, our memories, and our sense of responsibility?

Merging a background in fine art with digital media, the series hovers between realism and abstraction. The result is a body of work that creates dialogue between beauty and discomfort, reminding us of the fragile line between visual delight and ecological consequence.

At the heart of this historic partnership lies a single moment: Messi’s gravity-defying header in the 2009 Champions League Final against Manchester United. It wasn’t just a goal — it was a moment when time paused. For the first time in his 20-year career, Messi has personally selected it as his most meaningful, and it is now being reborn through the lens of Anadol’s algorithmic imagination.

Using match data, Messi’s biometric signals, and AI-trained models that interpret emotion, Anadol has crafted a digital tapestry that transcends traditional sports iconography. The result is not merely a visualization — it’s a sensory archive, a pulse of Messi’s past reinterpreted as flowing light and computational rhythm.

Christie’s, known for supporting innovative art, ended the online auction with a final bid of $1,835,000. All money raised will help UNICEF and education programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is charity that connects the past with a better future.

For once, “artwork for the ages” is real. This isn’t a statue or photo—it’s a living record of emotion and skill, created by combining AI and sports. It shows Messi’s past, Anadol’s vision, and how art, once limited to paintings, now moves through data.

The work of Kutay Yavuz rests in that liminal, always-changing space where memories feel like air—you can touch them, breathe them, but you can’t hold them.

His background already suggests this sensibility: a historian who turned to cinematography, starting as an obsessive collector of images. He archived moments not for nostalgia’s sake but as evidence of lived experience. Kutay’s work is a fascinating blend of documentation and emotion, where the histories of the places he lives in become integral to his visual practice.

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Don’t Look Back - A Memoir

His “Don't Look Back / A Memoir” video art (part of Memoryscape/The Wrong Biennale) extends that instinct into a more vulnerable register. The work navigates the quiet ache of “homesickness,” but not as simple longing. It explores how memories shift with time—how they shed their less convenient edges, how they refine themselves into “good versions,” even during bad times and political turmoils, and how the mind rewrites its own archive for the sake of survival. Homesickness becomes less about a country or a childhood room and more about the after-image of a self one used to be.

It’s a natural next step for an artist who has always been good at catching the feeling of things that don’t last. 

His early pictures — quick silhouettes in Istanbul, Paris, London, Budapest; travellers stuck between places; night streets where someone has just been or is about to show up — are already full of stories that don’t want to finish. Many of these works rely on silhouettes or reflections as his preferred visual metaphor for the half-known human story: a present yet elusive narrative.

His biography strengthens this impression. A teenager in Antalya captures life with a low-budget camera, a young adult documents events and exhibitions at ARTER in Istanbul, and a traveller across Europe uses his lens as a way to stay connected to an ever-changing sense of belonging. Studying cinematography in the UK further sharpened his instinct, placing him within a new cultural context and deepening his visual discipline.

His latest video feels like the emotional synopsis of all these experiences. The work doesn’t mourn the lost home; it questions whether “home” was ever a stable geography to begin with. Memory is treated as a collaborator—unreliable, but generous. Yavuz seems to suggest that homesickness is not a yearning to go back but an awareness that the mind itself is the place we return to, again and again, reshaping rooms that no longer physically exist.

From my perspective, what makes his practice so captivating is how seamlessly he weaves personal history and visual inquiry. He approaches the urban environment like a historian reading a palimpsest, yet shoots with the intuitive curiosity of someone who still treats a camera as a diary. The body of work expands his ongoing preoccupation with urban solitude into a philosophical meditation on identity in transit. It affirms an artist who isn’t simply documenting the world, but mapping the shifting terrain of memory itself.

For a broader audience, including designers, filmmakers, and city explorers, Yavuz emerges as a representative of the in-between: a chronicler of the places that influence us and the manifestations of ourselves we leave behind as we traverse them.

In partnership with French automotive icon Renault, the project embodies the enduring design philosophy of simplexity — the delicate art of making the complex appear effortless. From the sleek integration of electric tech into retro contours to the unexpected textures and colour treatments, every detail speaks to a masterful balancing act between nostalgia and innovation.

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What’s particularly notable is the consistency of his creative voice. While his early career was marked by provocation and spectacle, this latest project shows a designer in full control — one who hasn’t abandoned the disruptive edge that made him famous, but has instead refined it into something more lasting. With the R17 Electric Restomod X, he doesn’t just redesign a car; he reimagines our relationship to motion, memory, and modernity.

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This isn’t wet tape on a mirror—though it might fool you at first glance. German artist Jochen Mühlenbrink masterfully blurs illusion and reality through a contemporary take on traditional trompe l’oeil painting. Using classical varnishing techniques, Mühlenbrink simulates the look of condensation on the glass, carefully adding hand-painted water droplets, wiped surfaces, and trompe l’oeil stickers and tape to create a hyperreal effect.

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Mühlenbrink revisits the age-old motif of the canvas’s reverse side. But in his hands, this trope is given new life, embedded with vintage postcards and faux masking tape, anchoring the work in both past and present. Through his precise technique and conceptual layering, Mühlenbrink continues to challenge how we see—and what we think we see.

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In the age of AI we will frantically search for a hand-made Art with a great hunger. So will do AI.

Alyssa Stevens is a New York-based artist working primarily with oil pastel on canvas. Her practice is rooted in the exploration of the space between worlds—formed by memory, longing, and connection.

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Often drawn to familiar places from childhood that feel altered and suspended in time, Stevens returns to these realms through her work, viewing them as portals to process loss, the unseen, and the impermanence of it all. Her process is intuitive, driven by feeling and form, and guided by a desire to understand what ties her to these in-between spaces.

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Kalle Hellzen discovered his passion for art in his 40th. For him, being colourblind is not a barrier to creating awe-inspiring art. His condition enhances reds, dims blues and blurs mid-spectrum colours, which is why he's making incredible contrast in his work. But it's his process itself which is fascinating.

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Calais begins with oil and acrylic paintings, creating original bases from which to work. He then works digitally with tools like Photoshop to generate print compositions. He often captures subjects in pause, falling, or contemplation, exploring the human experience of enduring and navigating life's challenges. Combining traditional printing, painting, varnishing, and pouring layers of gloss acrylic medium, he crafts one-of-a-kind original prints, describing his work as melancholy dipped in sunshine.

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Spring Coolers by Moreno Schweikle, launched in 2021, still feels fresh, especially in today's workplace design and post-pandemic social context. As part of Balenciaga’s Art in Stores project, Schweikle’s work stands out by subtly challenging the emphasis on pure function in industrial design.

At first glance, a water cooler might seem like an unlikely muse unless you are a fan of pre-COVID office small talks. But Schweikle transforms this routine object into a sculptural reinterpretation, blending it with neoclassical elements that recall historic city fountains. Spring Coolers changes the game by making designs about beauty as well as usefulness in the workplace.

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By turning "grabbing water" into a social event, Schweikle transforms the cooler into a modern meeting place—an open space where people can talk freely. In Balenciaga’s Art in Stores project, Spring Coolers is notable for its subtle insight and cultural importance, showing that even simple objects can hold significance.
Created in 2021, this work feels especially relevant today.

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Irina Kiro, a seasoned graphic designer turned illustrator, brings a bold visual punch to the portrait format in her electrifying series Portraits. Known for her vibrant minimalist approach, Kiro reinterprets faces through a kaleidoscopic lens of colour, geometry, and mood. Each piece in the series pulses with layered hues—blues, purples, tangerines—merging expressive emotion with the clean efficiency of vector art.

Her decade-long career that we covered through our pages informs her keen eye for composition and storytelling. In Portraits, she distills personality into angular forms and radiant overlays, achieving a striking harmony between abstraction and humanity.

With an impressive roster of clients including Wired, The Guardian, L’Oréal, and Kiehl’s, Kiro proves that minimalist illustration can still be emotionally rich—and wildly captivating. Portraits is not just a collection of faces; it’s a celebration of identity in technicolor.

Francisco Ratti grew up amidst Patagonia's dry winds and vast open spaces, where he first discovered his connection to painting. He later earned his Bachelor's degree and now teaches painting as a professor of visual arts at the Faculty of Arts, National University of La Plata. Based in La Plata, where he lives and works, Ratti's artistic practice explores the concept of surfaces, opening up thoughtful dialogues between the digital and analogue realms.

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Ratti paints from a place of contradiction and doubt, where every colour, form, and gesture interrogates itself. For him, uncertainty is not a weakness but a generative force—an insistence that gradually sharpens into clarity. His work emerges from internal battles, where buried images resurface, dissolve, and reconfigure. Ratti sees disorientation as essential; getting lost becomes a pathway to recognition.

In the suspended space between dawn and dusk, his painting becomes both wound and river — a site of confrontation, transformation, and fleeting wholeness.

Digital artist Sebastian Marek shared his latest visual story of everyday things’ secret life.

"The Secret Life of Everyday Things" is a surreal animated journey where the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. With seamless, flowing visuals, household items break free from their usual functions and take on unexpected roles, blurring the line between reality and imagination. It serves as a reminder that even the simplest things can reveal unexpected wonders when viewed through a different lens.

Nick Cave’s marketing team approached OneTenEleven (lead by Antony Kitson you may remember from our Digital Decade events) in late 2023

Forming Wild God

When Nick shared his vision for Wild God, it was clear the name carried a deep, almost spiritual weight — dark yet full of hope. We embraced that feeling by keeping the design bold and minimal, like a sacred sculpture. The cover isn’t just graphic — it’s real, made from hand-placed, heat-molded white plastic letters, giving the title physical presence.

The Wild God Tour

For The Wild God Tour, the team developed a bold visual identity featuring variations of the title design across posters, banners, and billboards. An infinite colour-phasing animation served as the tour's intro, with large-scale screens integrated into each venue. Digital assets were delivered in multiple resolutions, and in collaboration between “Thunderwing & Nick Cave” and OneTenEleven, animated lyric visuals — personally curated by Nick Cave — were created to accompany live performances, reflecting his input on motion and colour direction.

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Vinyl & CD Packaging

3D pack shots created for the Wild God campaign. Created from Thunderwing’s artwork, 3D modelling in Cinema4D, textures & lighting with Redshift.

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Lyrics Videos

Created for the Wild God Album Campaign throughout 2024/25.