A largely figurative painter with a penchant for literary citation, Andrew Salgado turns his attention to the still life in a new body of work. Wanting to depart from his narrative-driven process in favor of subject matter allowing for greater intuition and spontaneity, the artist began to render vibrant bouquets in his signature gestural marks. Color ripples across each canvas, presenting the stylized florals in various states of blossom and decay.

Salgado is an avid, eclectic reader, and while his still lifes operate at a remove from his typically reference-rich compositions, they still contain snippets of texts and art history. Awash in blues of all shades, “The Prince,” for example, emerges from a Thomas Bernhard novel that follows an aristocratic protagonist’s descent into paranoia and obsession. In Salgado’s painting, the singular, focused color palette and flowers splayed in every direction mirror the frenetic energy of a message left on the table.

There’s also “Dear Theo,” which centers on a bright cluster of sunflowers synonymous with Vincent van Gogh. Like the title, a scribbled note at the bottom right is addressed to Theo, the Dutch painter’s brother and longtime financial supporter. “To be sufficiently heated up to melt those golds and those flower tones, not just anybody can do that,” Vincent famously wrote Theo. “It takes an individual’s whole and entire energy and attention.”

Being attuned to one’s energy and attention is also critical in this body of work. Rather than follow a rigid, predetermined path, the artist opted for more freedom and the ability to latch onto a thought or association and allow it, and the paint, to lead.

Glory! is on view from July 16 to August 15 at BEERS London. Keep up with Salgado on Instagram.

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The lively flora and fauna of a tiny Filipino island commingle with harrowing memories of California prisons in the surreal works of Gil Batle. Entirely self-taught, Batle honed his skills while incarcerated over the course of 25 years, drawing and eventually tattooing in a clandestine practice. Today, he’s immigrated to his parents’ native country, where he continues to reflect on the decades he spent in confinement.

Batle’s Double Life is a new body of work that explores these dual experiences. On white porcelain plates, the artist renders strange, unsettling compositions in which violence and a desire for freedom pervade every inch. Bird cages—common symbols for incarceration— are aplenty, while chains, barbs, and shivs haunt the scenes.

Utilizing such a commonplace, fragile, and even prized material, Batle sets a poignant backdrop for considering his blue acrylic paintings. The delicate porcelain both nods to the precarity and breakable nature of life, while also symbolizing traditional ideas of civility and propriety. Juxtaposing these domestic objects with scenes rife with struggle and brutality offers uncanny insight into one of humanity’s continually barbarous acts.

Double Life is on view through August 21 at New York’s Ricco/Maresca, a contemporary gallery representing outsider, self-taught, and folk artists.

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For a structure that was completed nearly 90 years ago, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge possesses a kind of timeless modernity. It’s been the subject of countless photographs, often seen in the background from Baker Beach or from the overlook in Marin County. Its towers rise 500 feet from the roadway, but we typically can only see the structures from that level. For photographer Marcin Zając, a drone’s-eye view revealed a unique perspective of this iconic landmark.

Zając’s image is one of 101 finalists in the 2026 International Aerial Photographer of the Year, marking the second year of the competition. Photographers around the world submitted nearly 1,600 entries, with the top honor awarded to Azim Khan Ronnie, who draws on his background in journalism to capture human activities like fishing and harvesting crops.

Photographs considered for the competition range from drone views to shots taken from airplanes or the tops of buildings. Subject matter ranges from erupting volcanoes and geological phenomena to architecture and cultural events. See the top 101 photos on the contest’s website.

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“Improbable but not impossible” is how Brazilian artist Ana Elisa Egreja describes the unexpected companions in her vibrant still lifes. Combining the architectural motifs, animals, and fare common in her native São Paulo with elements from abroad, Egreja positions domestic spaces as sites of change, where migration and cross-cultural pollination come to bear.

In a new suite of 15 oil paintings, the artist draws on the long tradition of Dutch Golden Age still lifes alongside the contrived qualities of collage. Tablescapes filled with fresh flowers and shiny produce also contain cellophane-wrapped snacks and canned goods. Egreja acknowledges flight as a rich symbol of freedom and migration, and birds swirl overhead and perch atop the uncanny objects. There’s also a pair of window pieces, blanketed in 24-karat gold leaf and decorative wrought grilles, which serve as an interstitial spot for the winged creatures to pause as they move between interior and exterior.

Egreja’s focus on bridging these divides emerges in her renditions of sunsets, too, with their bold gradients rippling from crimson to amber across living spaces. This glowing feature backdrops both “Interior with a Jaguar and Sun Conure,” in which a forlorn feline lounges on an Art Deco sofa, and “Interior with Five Cats at Sunset.” The latter also contains a sculptural element as the vibrant light streams through a beaded curtain mounted to the painting’s edge.

Taking a magical realist approach to migration, Egreja questions the hard boundaries we perceive between private and public space, wildness and domesticity, as well as international borders. She also renders these lines illegible to our non-human counterparts, nodding to an ongoing organic exchange between seemingly disparate entities.

The works shown here are part of the artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., titled The Flight of Color, which runs from July 16 to September 5 at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Explore more of the artist’s practice on Instagram.

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For more than three decades, Rob Hann has pursued the inimitable and notable, turning his lens toward public figures like Tom Hanks, David Byrne, Chloe Sevigny, Ray Lotta, Willem Dafoe, and many others. He also ranges across the breadth and length of the U.S., traversing storied highways like U.S. 89 in Arizona, a popular route to the Grand Canyon, or U.S. 90 in Texas, which passes through the artistic enclave of Marfa. Not unlike the way he captures portraits of people, his characterizations of the country’s endearingly quirky and remote places highlight individuality, presence, and the passage of time.

Hann’s subjects range from handmade road signs and vintage buildings to peculiar local attractions like trees completely covered in shoes. He sometimes captures site-specific artworks such as Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” (1973-76) in Utah’s Great Basin Desert or Magda Sayeg’s crocheted retro camper trailer at El Cosmico in Marfa. There’s often a tinge of tongue-in-cheek humor, too, such as a sign reading “ICY” amid an arid desert landscape in southeastern California or a half-buried car.

“Although my photos are usually very simple, I often like it when the viewer is not quite sure what it is that they’re seeing, when they have questions,” Hann tells Colossal. “I’m often attracted to things that are amusing, unintentionally funny, or things that are puzzling.”

For the vast majority of his career, Hann has shot with an analog Mamiya 7, only recently adding a digital camera to his routine: a Hasselblad X2D. One of the major differences is that the Mamiya takes a roll of film with only 10 frames, so there’s a more disciplined approach to avoid wasting rolls. With digital cameras, the number of images is only limited by the space on an SD card. “I try to make good decisions as I shoot and avoid wading through huge amounts of images on my computer when I get home,” Hann says. “With both cameras, I only use one fixed lens, and when shooting film, I just use one film stock.”

Color images have also emerged as an important tenet of Hann’s practice despite an earlier preference for black-and-white photography. “I was required to also shoot colour when working for magazines and record companies,” he says. “I could do it but struggled to make the colour photos special or make them feel like my own. It took me many years to get my head around making consistently good colour images.” Today, the emotive potential of color, explored through different levels of saturation and warmth, plays a significant role.

Hann is currently working with The Artist Edition toward the publication of a new book titled Wonder Valley, which is slated for release sometime later this year. Follow updates on Instagram.

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In Pioche, Nevada, a movie theater built in 1937 stands in tribute to the immense changes in technology and style over nearly a century. A bold portrait set against a black background by photographer Kevin Boyle captures not only the aging building but a mid-20th-century pastime that taps into nostalgia and small town identity. (Amid preservation efforts, the theater is currently being rehabilitated.) It’s just one of the works in the artist’s ongoing Movieland series, which won the Architecture category in this year’s Hasselblad Masters 2026 contest.

Additional categories in the prestigious competition include Wildlife, Landscape, Art, Portrait, Street, and Project//21, which highlights work by entrants aged 21 or younger. This year, photographers in 160 countries submitted more than 108,000 images, which were narrowed down to 70 finalists.

In addition to their technical aptitude, the artists illuminate lesser-known pockets of the world by examining distinctive social issues, nature, and geographies. The winning photos are atmospheric and even surreal, such as Rohan Reilly’s low-exposure Ephemeral Visions series of rows of trees and Gosse Bouma’s misty depictions of Netherlandish market stalls in Morning Ritual.

Svetlana Jovanovic turns her lens to bold dual portraits of identical twins, and Alfred Minnaar’s otherworldly captures of underwater vitality topped the Wildlife category. Panitbhand Paribatra Na Ayudhya, winner of the Project//21 category, is a 14-year-old scuba diver from Thailand who explores the beauty, fragility, and biodiversity of the ocean in beautiful portrayals of marine life.

Hasselblad Foundation executive director Kalle Sanner says, “Across categories, the strongest work operated on more than one level simultaneously: legible on first encounter, yet resistant to easy interpretation. These are images that require attention, that continue to unfold the longer you stay with them.” For example, Yudha Kusuma Putera’s uncanny photographs of huddled cows’ backs nod to the unseen. What we don’t see is as significant as what we do, as these animals are actually grazing on heaps of trash in a dump on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Exploring notions of labor and visibility, Putera takes a visually literal approach to “out of sight, out of mind.”

See all the winning images on the Hasselblad Masters website.

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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 9 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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