Joy Machine and Vertical Gallery are excited to share their first collaborative exhibition, Wanderland by Collin van der Sluijs. This marks the artist’s sixth solo exhibition in Chicago and more than a decade in partnership with Vertical Gallery. It’s his first presentation at Joy Machine.

Wanderland comprises a new body of work developed during a two-year period. Spanning enormous mixed-media paintings, intimate drawings, and skate decks bearing the artist’s signature birds, the exhibition reflects both the momentous and mundane, particularly loss, grief, and the therapeutic powers of nature.

A portmanteau of wander and wonderland, the title evokes van der Sluijs’ continued devotion to imagining a vast, dreamlike ecosystem. For the past decade, he’s produced various bodies of work as a sort of world-building exercise, intuitively selecting a blend of oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, and more to render dynamic still lifes and portraits of figures subsumed by chaos. Wanderland continues in this vein, once again presenting hazy bouquets that allude to the artist’s Dutch heritage and a melange of symbols and markings referencing his background in street art. “Collin works in such a wide range of styles—like a modern twist on classical painting, with graffiti and illustration mixed in,” Patrick Hull, Vertical’s owner and curator, shares.

Each collection emerges through a lengthy process of trial and error, and often, van der Sluijs will work on a piece for years, even turning it around to face the wall periodically to provide a brief respite while in his studio. “I really need to make big mistakes and fight my way out of it,” he adds. In this way, cultivating wonder and an unceasing desire to explore his inner emotional and external landscapes is an essential part of the process.  Wanderland is about “a walk to the visual world that you create around yourself, like wandering around. But it’s also like diving into the unknown.”

Following a collection of darker pieces made during the early years of the pandemic, Wanderland emerges with more levity and hope, albeit not without difficulty and grief. While working toward the exhibition, the artist broke his ankle, rendering it impossible for him to stand while painting larger canvases hanging on the wall. Instead, he had to sit, stretching himself across the horizontal surfaces and contending with a novel, challenging mode of making.

And despite his physical limitations, van der Sluijs also spent more time venturing outdoors during the last two years. Making small works on paper amid natural settings was a sort of balm in processing the recent death of a friend. “All those personal stories, they make the context of a show,” he adds.

To celebrate more than a decade of collaborations, Vertical Gallery published a book commemorating the occasions titled Wanderland: 1991-2026. Its pages juxtapose the artist’s exploits as a painter, muralist, and graffiti writer with the more personal moments that define his roles as husband, son, father, and friend. 

Wanderland runs from July 10 to August 22. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on July 10. The artist will be present.

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In his characteristically illustrative, enigmatic style, Phlegm’s monochrome compositions evoke wonder, mischief, and riddles. Hybrid figures, strange interactions, and uncanny combinations of objects fill his idosyncratic murals, about which we can only speculate the meaning. “I think a lot about the barriers between people understanding each other, and I think I enjoy making artwork that floats in some grey area,” the London-based artist tells Colossal.

The past several years have been dominated by a fascination with copper engraving, “to the point where I pretty much stopped painting murals,” Phlegm says. He’s spent much of the time in an almost monastic reverence to printmaking techniques of the Northern Renaissance, initially delving into the work of a group of German printmakers known as The Little Masters, who practiced their craft on minuscule surfaces just an inch or two across.

Phlegm then embarked on an ambitious completist project focused exclusively on Albrecht Dürer’s “Knight, Death, and the Devil,” which he created in 1513 and incorporated a wealth of iconography, the meaning of which is still debated by art historians today. “I spent a great deal of time collecting old copies of it, studying it under a microscope, and figuring out how the image was created,” the artist says. “The last two years, I’ve been engraving my own version where I’ve replaced everything for my own but tried to stay true to the line work and layout of the composition.”

In what may seem to be in total opposition to the broad strokes required to paint a mural several stories high, engraving requires painstaking attention to detail. But as he returns to mural-making, Phlegm revisits themes that crop up regularly in his work, from folk law and ritual to prehistory and archaeology.

“I think in my work, I’ve always loved telling broken stories that can land as either dark or light— narratives that feel hard to read clearly,” he says. With archaeology, for instance, “you can piece together tangible parts of a story and get glimpses of moments from the past, but it’s often broken or without context. I’m very drawn to this feeling.”

The idea of honesty in art is not a new one, but discussion of its role has emerged with more gusto in the era of the internet, social media, and generative AI. Phlegm describes his approach as one centered around honesty, which might be further defined in terms of candidness, sincerity, and attention to detail. His cryptic works appear to possess a narrative, but what that is, we’re never totally sure. But that’s the point. “I often meticulously work out their history and intricate stories only to leave out large chunks,” the artist says.

In designing a mural, he might write an entire story and format a set of frames like one might find in a comic book, but only a fragment of this tale gets translated onto a wall. “It helps me make something that feels authentic and stops me approaching the space with a mindset tainted by trying to make something look good,” he says. “Looking good tends to come secondary to the storytelling.” Nevertheless, having focused for a time on very intricate, small-scale work, his approach to large-scale murals has become what he describes as more fluid and confident.

See more on the Phlegm’s Instagram, and you can also stay updated via his Substack.

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Although Amelia Cross subscribes to the belief that our sartorial choices are a way to signal who we are and what we care about, she also knows there are more subliminal details hiding in personal style. A nametag curling at the edges or a pen bleeding through a shirt pocket stand in stark contrast to a perfectly pressed collar or shiny brogues, but each also has the potential to conceal or obscure. These covert elements are what the London-born artist is most interested in unpacking.

After receiving a degree in bespoke tailoring at the London College of Fashion, followed by a master’s in painting at the Royal College of Art, Cross began to meld the two disciplines. “I originally painted figureless compositions of clothing on a flat linen surface but felt my hands itching to use my sewing machine alongside painting. I started making small studies of sewn pockets and structured collars with painted objects and buttons, and I found this odd juxtaposition of the real and painted shadows really intriguing,” she said.

The artist landed on the concept of “sewn paintings,” which combine trompe-l’œil methods with constructed, sculptural details. Illusory in technique and legible in subject matter, the works prompt the viewer to decipher which three-dimensional components are real.

Cross stretches her own canvases and sometimes thinks about the wooden armature as a body, one she’s able to dress and style. More focused works hone in on a singular pocket or pair of shoes. Many of her ideas, though, emerge while observing other commuters on the London Underground. She explains:

During rush hour, you’re often packed in a carriage like sardines, which is sometimes why my paintings have a slim tight crop as I can only see a partial element of clothing at a time. You can almost build up a whole character for someone based on what’s inside their pocket or what socks they are wearing to work!

For her solo exhibition Discipline and Display at Nino Mier Gallery, Cross leans into dress codes, uniforms, and the overt or more subconscious rules that inform how we put together an outfit. The hidden agendas and social structures that inform fashion appear in the artist’s compositions, too.

“I often conceal secrets or confessions in the works (some on display and some totally hidden) such as painted inner collar labels, messages inside pockets and buttons on the sides and undersides of paintings,” she adds. The goal is to entice the viewer to get up close and personal with the disembodied forms, offering the opportunity to study the minute details and signals we might otherwise overlook.

If you’re in New York, Discipline and Display is on view through August 7. Otherwise, find more from Cross on Instagram.

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769 photographers and astronomers around the world, representing 66 countries, submitted more than 4,000 images to this year’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The shortlisted photos represent a range of phenomena from aurorae and stars to planets and the moon, captured around the globe. Some photographers focus on the juxtaposition of space and the human environment while others take telescopically captured snapshots of distant galaxies and nebulae, creating striking composite images.

Winners will be announced on September 17, the day after which the public exhibition will open at London’s National Maritime Museum. The show is also accompanied by the book Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Collection 15.

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In Dutch Golden Age still-life painting, it’s not uncommon to be treated to tables laden with flowers and food such as fruits, game, and fish. These works were painstakingly rendered; one can practically smell the sea. But the flip side is the temporality of these items, as the painting preserves their freshness, but we know they will ultimately decay. This incorporation of memento mori was intentional, as the inevitability of death was something people meditated carefully on.

Flora and fauna in Dutch painting also demonstrate abundance and diversity, from myriad types of foods to hyperrealistic flower arrangements, such as those of Rachel Ruysch, that may have had folkloric hidden meanings. For artist Veks Van Hillik, tropes from these canvases find their way into surreal, eccentric paintings and murals that also nod to contemporary concerns and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

“There is also something almost systematic in the way humans tend to personify animals and project a certain form of anthropomorphism onto the stories we tell about them,” Van Hillik tells Colossal. “I enjoy playing with these unspoken codes inherited from fables and folk tales. And, whether intentionally or not, an ecological subtext—or at the very least a reflection on our ecosystems—often emerges in my work, something I like to preserve and contemplate.”

Fish emerged rather enigmatically as a central focus on Van Hillik’s work, partly because they were among the very first things he learned to draw as a child, when one of his older brothers taught him. “But the marine and aquatic world also offers an almost endless variety of forms, colors, and patterns,” he says. “Sometimes graceful, sometimes monstrous or grotesque, fish are almost always somewhat surreal.”

In his large-scale murals, and also increasingly in the studio, Van Hillik nods to the tones and settings of historical still life paintings, including sturdy surfaces, dark backgrounds, and architectural niches. Spilling from these are objects and animals we instantly recognize, such as birds, plants, and insects. But first impressions may be misleading, as upon closer inspection, a butterfly is missing its body, a nautilus balances on a bubble, and a heron’s beak transforms into a key.

Van Hillik is interested in weight and presence along with unusual relationships and hybrid creatures. Fish, in particular, are the kind of thing we eat regularly, and some of us may even cast a line for them from time to time, but they live in a world entirely different from ours. The earth’s aquatic expanses comprise a realm we are far from fully understanding; we’ve only mapped a little over a quarter of the entire sea floor, for example, and we really have no idea how many marine species there really are.

Along with what Van Hillik describes as their fascinating “peculiar sense of levitation,” fish are among some of his favorite animals to portray, representing both familiarity and mystery. Along with a range of other composite creatures, such as a tortoise shell-backed hare and a vivid, rather unsettlingly big-eyed goldfish with arms and legs, the artist leans into this sense of weightlessness and the uncanny, suspending plant stems, water droplets, and other objects in the air.

Van Hillik’s work was recently included in Common Waters at Arch Enemy Arts, where he is also slated for a solo show later this year. Follow updates on Instagram.

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At Cranbrook Academy of Art, no two doors are exactly alike.

That was by design. Architect Eliel Saarinen believed even the smallest details deserved thoughtful consideration. Each door across Cranbrook’s historic campus serves the same purpose, yet each possesses its own distinct character—a reminder that creativity is found not in repetition, but in the possibilities created by difference.

With this spirit in mind, Cranbrook Academy of Art is reopening graduate applications for Fall 2026. Applications will be accepted from June 22 through August 15 for a limited number of available openings in select programs. For artists and designers considering graduate study, this additional application period provides another opportunity to join one of the nation’s most distinctive graduate programs.

Students are encouraged to apply as early as possible to claim the limited remaining spots and merit-based scholarships.

For nearly a century, Cranbrook has offered a graduate experience built around intensive studio practice, critical dialogue, and close mentorship. Every department is led by a single Artist-in-Residence—a practicing artist, designer, or architect—whose commitment is to their own work and to the development of their students. Rather than following a standardized curriculum, students engage directly with accomplished practitioners in an environment that encourages experimentation, inquiry, and the pursuit of new ideas.

At Cranbrook, the studio is the classroom. The environment is the teacher.

Students are immersed in a community that challenges assumptions, expands perspectives, and encourages new ways of thinking. It is a place where conversations become collaborations, disciplines intersect, and ideas are tested through action, and action leads to innovation. 

Founded in 1932 and located on Cranbrook’s historic 320-acre campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, just north of Detroit, the academy remains a place where creative practice and daily life are deeply intertwined. Designed by Saarinen, the campus continues to embody the belief that the built environment can shape how we learn, work, and create.

Students come to Cranbrook seeking more than a degree. They come for the opportunity to immerse themselves in their practice, challenge assumptions, and develop work that reflects their unique voice and ambitions.

Applications open June 22 and close August 15, 2026. Financial aid is available, and all admitted students are considered for merit-based scholarships.

To learn more, visit cranbrookart.edu.

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Drawing on her experience as a textile designer and her family’s artistic heritage, Susan Maddux investigates the relationships between fabric, painting, and sculpture. If some of her longer pieces evoke the folds of kimonos, for example, it’s not a coincidence. Tapping into both her Hawaiian upbringing and Japanese heritage, the artist creates vibrant works that drape on the wall like elegant cloaks hung up after a walk.

A small piece titled “Mantle” is redolent of the historical clothing worn to keep the shoulders warm. Other works feature conceptual or metaphysical names, such as “Flourish” and “Thrum.” Maddux sometimes stacks the bunches of folds several feet high, mirroring human proportions so that, while abstract, there is a nuanced reference to the body and the timelessness of textiles.

With thick canvas folds, the artist emphasizes the power of repeated gestures and motifs, occasionally incorporating patterns and plumbing the tension between softness and firmness and what is concealed or revealed. She’s currently experimenting with the addition of different materials and new patterns following time spent at the RONDO art residency in Mexico City.

See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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“Spain has an extraordinary, unbroken creative tradition: art, literature, music, research,” says Nieves González. From 16th-century portraitist El Greco to Baroque painters like Diego Velázquez and Bartolomé Murillo, the nation’s art history brims with narrative and intrigue. In the 17th century especially, dramatic contrasts of light and shadow influenced by Italian painter Caravaggio met movement, emotion, and religiosity to create theatrical tableaux.

For González, this legacy informs a painting practice that merges past and present. “Creating isn’t something we do. It’s something we are,” the artist says in a statement. “And I come from that; I carry it in my body.” Her expressive oil compositions draw upon aristocratic portraits and religious paintings, centering the focus on beautiful women who wear contemporary parkas and puffer coats.

It would be remiss not to mention the AI-generated meme of Pope Francis wearing a giant white puffer coat, which swept across the internet in 2023 and appeared so realistic that it initially fooled many into thinking it was real. The stir was not only about the perils of the technology and deepfakes but also that the image itself was so jarring. The papacy originated approximately 2,000 years ago and is steeped in specific customs, rituals, and visuals, so to imagine the pope wearing something so modern felt out of sync with time and tradition.

This asynchronous tension is what González latches onto, albeit in a somewhat more tender, considerate way. She merges art historical tropes with an emphasis on women protagonists and garments that reflect style trends distinctive to the late 20th and 21st centuries. With demure expressions, vivid outfits, and direct gazes, the figures central in her paintings buck the norm.

“I’ve never tried to separate the cultured from the popular or the historical from the contemporary,” the artist says. “What interests me is precisely that these references speak to one another and generate something alive, not a nostalgic image of the past but something with a pulse today…But what ties all those layers together, if I had to name just one thing, is a search for humanity and emotion within the image. That whoever looks at the painting feels something real. That’s what matters to me.”

A few of the works seen here are currently on view in the artist’s solo exhibition, A Friendship Story, which continues through July 25 at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. See more on the artist’s Instagram. You might also enjoy Ewa Juszkiewicz’s reimagined historical portraits of women.

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The last few mornings, as I’ve walked with my dog up the ravine behind my house, two fawns seem to bound of thin air, racing in unison through the trees until far enough way that they stop, stare, and wait for us to pass. It’s not uncommon to see several does grazing in the same woods, and I’ve always wondered where they sleep. Photographer Katherine Wolkoff followed a similar curiosity as she traversed the grassy meadows of Block Island, which sits a few miles off the coast of Rhode Island, for her series Deer Beds.

Flattened by lean cervid bodies, tall grasses reveal the areas where deer bed down. They don’t typically sleep in the same place every single night, but a home range area may have several spots that they return to repeatedly. Wolkoff prints the images at nearly life size, focusing directly on the nest-like spaces in intimate, horizonless meditations on comfort, presence, care, and resilience.

When the series was first exhibited, critic Eva Diaz noted in Artforum that “The prevailing metaphor of photography is that of the hunt. Photographers shoot, even stalk, their subjects; in the case of Katherine Wolkoff’s work, the absence of ‘prey’ itself becomes the subject of the project.” Sometimes during a walk, the artist encounters deer nestled in the grass and they dart away, startled. Other times, the beds are already empty.

“My mother, a science teacher, first mentioned deer beds to me, and I began walking the fields, following deer paths to find them,” Wolkoff tells Colossal. “That solitary, meditative search is still central to how I work today.” Broadly, her work focuses on the natural world in the Anthropocene, plumbing the relationship between humans and the land in light of the ongoing climate crisis.

The artist is currently finishing a book of pinhole photographs taken from the perspective of migrating birds on Block Island. “The resulting pictures have a blurred, frantic quality that I think of as visualizing the birds’ depletion: the chaos of an animal pushed to its limits over open water and unfamiliar coastline, flying through the night with no guarantee of where it will land or whether it will survive the crossing,” she says. Some of these works will be part of a forthcoming exhibition centered around the Atlantic Flyway at Benrubi Gallery next spring.

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Whether it’s the atmosphere casting a haze or the fuzziness of memories and dreams, Guimi You’s lush paintings have an aura of wistfulness and quietude. The Seoul-based artist creates dreamy oil compositions that tap into personal experience, passing time, and how one gains perspective and reevaluates their needs or desires as they go through life.

You’s canvases are infused with elements of still life and landscape traditions, where anonymous protagonists reflect quietly in a garden, pause in a golden meadow, or stroll through a park in the rain. Cerulean shadows complement the magenta jacket of a woman strolling with her dog along a stream in “Spring Walk,” and a woman sits down at an easel in an open doorway in “Painting, Again.”

Several of the works seen here are included in You’s current solo exhibition, When the Sun Shines Again at Lehmann Maupin, a meditation on rediscovery and beginning again. “Conceived as a tribute to those who have returned to creating after time away, the works unfold through a recurring image of sunlight, an enduring symbol of clarity, renewal, and hope,” the gallery says.

The figures sometimes appear to blend into the backgrounds like secondary characters, while the spaces filled with objects, contrasting light, and portals take center stage. Individual faces are often obscured or shadowy, introspectively looking down or away. Some appear lost in thought, while others concentrate on a creative task, such as throwing pottery on a wheel or putting a brush to canvas. There is a somberness tinged with hope as You taps into the courage required to start anew.

The artist’s approach, the gallery says, “synthesizes East Asian pictorial traditions of evocation and atmospheric transparency with Western lineages such as Romanticism and Surrealism, positioning landscape not as an escapist subject, but as a space for reflecting on memory, subjectivity, and how we situate ourselves within the world.”

When the Sun Shines Again continues through August 14 in New York City.

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