DESIGNCOLLECTOR — Network (original) (raw)

Jochen Mühlenbrink’s fogged realities

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.

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.

Colourful Mind of Alyssa Stevens

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.

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.

Melancholy dipped in sunshine by Kalle Hellzen

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.

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.

Spring Coolers by Moreno Schweikle

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.

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.

Portraits in Prism by Irina Kiro

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

“My artistic practice develops around the different possible ways of creating images, dialoguing with tradition and art history from a current perspective. I am interested in constructing an image permeable to the present and reality that establishes an explicit dialogue with the digital image. I address traditional painting about new media and ways of looking at and translating reality. A question underlies this work:
How do we look at a painting, and how do we look at a screen?”

— Francisco Ratti

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.

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.

The Secret Life Of Everyday Things

Long time no motion design feature on our pages!

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 "Wild God" Identity by OneTenEleven

Wild God is the eighteenth studio album by the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released on 30 August 2024 on PIAS.

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.

Lyrics Videos

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

SPACES by Grant Yun

Grant Riven Yun is a Korean-American digital artist known on the NFT scene for his minimalist “Neo-Precisionist” style, capturing quiet moments in American suburbia and landscapes. Balancing life as a medical student, breakdancer and NFT OG, Yun blends nostalgia and precision in digital scenes inspired by artists like Hopper and Sheeler. His work has been exhibited internationally and featured in collaborations with Moma, Sotheby’s auctions, and NFT platforms, providing a fresh perspective on the beauty of the everyday.

“SPACES, Grant Yun’s latest body of work, thoughtfully investigates the profound transformations in our built environments driven by technological innovation, automation, and shifting labor paradigms. Created over several years, Yun’s vector-based illustrations reflect critically upon how exponential advances in artificial intelligence, remote work, digitization, and data infrastructure have reshaped the relationships between humanity, productivity, and physical space.”

SPACES is a series of 20 artworks. Each is a 1/1 NFT edition with an accompanying 3 + 2 AP print, with print edition 1 available to the NFT holder at cost. They are available via 24hr auctions (Ξ0.1 reserves) on fellowship.xyz, starting at 1pm ET on Apr 30th.

Ballpoint pen art by Castro Adefisayo

Castro Adefisayo is a talented artist based in Nigeria, celebrated for his incredible ability to craft stunning portraits using only a ballpoint pen. His artwork showcases the diverse beauty of humanity, capturing the essence of individuals across various genders, ethnicities, ages, and socio-cultural backgrounds.

Through meticulous attention to detail and a unique technique, Castro brings his subjects to life on the canvas, inviting viewers to appreciate the intricate stories and emotions that define each person he portrays. His work highlights the aesthetic charm of human figures and conveys a powerful message about the universal dignity and worth of every individual.

Curly Bahar

Curly B or Bahar is a young artist from Teheran finishing her Masters in Arts. Her confident, angular brush strokes give the painting a raw, expressive energy. There's a sense of fragmentation, but it's intentional—almost like emotional cubism.

She may just started (assuming the artist career) pouring oil on canvas but the use of light feels dramatic, theatrical even it directs your focus almost subconsciously.

One also need spend some time watching her inks getting stronger in a sketchbook pages she shared on OBJKT as NFTs. Really impressive strokes catching the characters.

City Pop by Hiroshi Nagai

Hiroshi Nagai (b. 1947) is a Japanese artist known for his vibrant, nostalgic illustrations that capture the dreamy essence of summer. Inspired by the 1970s and ’80s pop culture, his work often features palm trees, swimming pools, and sleek architecture under bright blue skies.

His signature style became iconic during the rise of Japan’s City Pop music scene, especially through album covers like Eiichi Ohtaki’s A Long Vacation. Blending clean lines, bold colours, and a calm, minimalist aesthetic, Nagai creates timeless scenes that feel both familiar and surreal.

Heyshiro - Painting in Whispers of Light

Heyshiro’s approach to acrylic is unlike anyone else’s. Instead of bold, heavy strokes, he builds up his paintings slowly—thin, watery washes layered over faint sketches of colour. The effect isn’t just an image; it’s an atmosphere, a depth that feels almost luminous like the light is coming from within the canvas itself.

I can find you, 2024

His recent portraits are quiet but powerful. They start fragile, almost tentative, before sharpening into clarity. The surface doesn’t feel painted so much as breathed onto—soft, delicate, like fog on glass. Then, at the very end, he anchors it all with faint pencil lines, just enough to pull that dreamlike quality back into reality.

Heyshiro doesn’t just paint figures. He finds them, layer by layer, through light and shadow, working at a pace that feels more like meditation than art-making.

Transhumanism by Joanna Grochowska

What future do we want?

What must we do to get there?*

"TRANSHUMANISM" is an exhibition and a conceptual book by Joanna Grochowska affirming the transhumanist philosophy, worldview, and movement. Building on her earlier project Opening the Future (Munich, 2021), Grochowska explores the merging of human and technology, embracing concepts of human enhancement, morphological freedom, and the aesthetics of the posthuman condition.

Through distorted, purposefully incongruous, and slightly unsettling imagery, Grochowska confronts viewers with evolving notions of beauty, pleasure, and identity. The works are more than speculative visions of a dystopian AI future—they challenge the ethical boundaries of what it means to be human in an era of unnatural, edited, and superior life forms.

Latest “Transhumanism” solo show took place at the Galerie Verbeeck - Van Dyck in Antwerp.

The TRANSHUMANISM exhibition continues and extends the discourse initiated by Jeffrey Deitch’s 1992 Post Human series, drawing upon the ideas of thinkers like Elon Musk and Raymond Kurzweil. It addresses shifting paradigms of gender, body, and self in the face of accelerating technological evolution—ultimately seeking a new aesthetic language for the future human form.

Discover Joanna Grochowska’s book, “TRANSHUMANISM,” a compelling monograph featuring insights from Raymond Kurzweil and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner.

Anastasiya Mykhaylova and The Poetics of Loss

Grief, sorrow, loss—all of that is one of the hardest topics to reflect on, not in a straightforward way. Of course, it is impossible to forget the Pieta motif, which literally demonstrates all the pain that a mother can have when losing a child. However, this does not mean that no different strategies exist in this area.

Last Stop, Parked Forever, 2024

Anastasiya Mykhaylova is a photo and video artist based in London. Originally from Ukraine, her background is closely connected with the classical art system, but the moment she took a camera in her hands, she understood that new media had much more to offer her in terms of creative possibilities.

Four of Us, 2023

Her oeuvre is a form of self-reflective archaeology where the artist studies heritage themes and personal and collective memories. Her work engages with emotion's metaphysical and anthropomorphic aspects, offering a more abstract interpretation of identity and presence. All of this led her to one of the most poetical and metaphysical at the same time photo series – I See You Everywhere I Go, which is a love letter filled with grief because of the loss of her grandfather.

Memories within the rubble, 2022

The outline Mykhaylova gives to her project says: After the passing of my grandfather, our house carried remnants of his soul. His presence lingered in the peaceful creaks of the floorboards and the lights that flickered above the table where he used to work. With this experience, I got to know grief as a magical presence that looms in the quiet spaces between moments, both haunting and tender in its embrace. Furthermore, it is obvious that she implies some of the Magical Realism aesthetics and a bit of De Chiricoesque visual elements that create a strong pattern of absence.

Our sacred place by the dam, 2023

The fact that the artist chose not just one setting but a multitude of locations, demonstrates her ability to work and develop the topic she studies in different environments. The photographs of the house, are not mundane snapshots of where her grandfather has lived, in fact they go beyond the familiar. These are locations that build a story of a person who became an ephemeral object, a glimpse in one’s mind. If the artist continues to work in this area, she will definitely remain in contemporary art history as a female photographer who mastered the poetics of loss.

Carcass of the tides, 2024

Amy Hui Li

Born in the vibrant city of Guangzhou, China, Amy Hui Li pursued her passion for Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London, a prestigious institution known for its creative approach to the arts. She then further honed her skills by completing a Masters in Painting from the renowned Royal College of Art. Since then, Li has exhibited her captivating works extensively across major art hubs, including London, New York, and Taiwan.

Notably, her participation in two significant group shows, Unit: London Calling in 2023 and Worlds Beyond in 2024, has garnered attention and acclaim. Recently Li is set to present an exciting solo exhibition at the Unit London gallery, where she will showcase her innovative hybrid fabric artworks that skillfully interweave elements of sculpture, painting, and installation, inviting viewers into her unique artistic vision.

Kama Reis Art

Kama Reis is a contemporary artist whose work captures the essence of nostalgia and individual discovery. Using coloured pencils as her medium of choice, she masters the art of the medium in order to convey the pure freedom of childlike imagination as she investigates richer issues of individualism, culture, and existence itself. Her work considers the duality of human existence—its fleeting insignificance and yet the lasting mark each person leaves on the world.

Raised in a small village in Upper Silesia in Poland, Kama's own life journey took her from Kraków to Italy and now Barcelona in Spain where she continues to evolve as an artist. In her work, Kama invites viewers to engage with individual and collective identity and to craft a narrative spanning past and present with a rich and reflective hand.

The Blooming Soul

The Blooming Soul: An Artistic Act Through the Lens of Botanical Metaphors

From March 12 to 17, 2025, the Eight Squared Gallery in Folkestone hosted the art exhibition "The Blooming Soul: A Celebration of Spring and Nature’s Awakening." This exhibition brought together eight outstanding international artists, each creating their works in various mediums ranging from abstract and figurative art to interactive installations.

The group of artists—Igor Khlopotov, Irina Slepko (Gauk), Iryna Yauseyenka, Mariia Babina, Natalia Titova, Svetlana Sycheva, Victoria Dini, and Yulia Rotkina—explored the interpenetration of artistic methods of understanding reality and various botanical concepts, techniques, methods, and established expressions. This interplay between the artist's symbolic field and the semiotic field of the gardener (botanist, florist, forester, naturalist, etc.) is a key conceptual finding of the exhibition, seemingly aimed at overcoming the fundamental boundaries between spheres of human activity and perception in pursuit of a hypothetical sense of wholeness, interconnectedness, and inseparability.

This exhibition is not merely a statement within the frameworks of unreflected eco-positivism that accompanies us from supermarket to trash bin; it is a bold and successful assertion by young outstanding artists striving for a deeper level of reflection that complements social anxiety with rhetorical intuitions, activist slogans with a metaphysical superstructure, and humanity's longing for nature with a bitter existential poetic humility.

The wide palette of artistic means and techniques, vivid images, and sumptuous colours—depicting themes of germination, the birth of life, the sprouting of seeds, swelling buds, sticky leaves, budding, and vegetative reproduction—poses a complex challenge of creating a non-trivial lexicon of new, previously non-existent symbolic connections that precede future neural ones. This allows us, for example, to transcend superficial sexuality in the imagery of the pistil and stamen and perceive in them a mystical or even religious yearning.
Each of the eight participants in the exhibition developed their paradoxical artistic strategy, revealing and enriching the aforementioned theme. In this article, we would like to focus in more detail on the works of two participants.

Within the exhibition 'The Blooming Soul,' the digital collage works of artist Natalia Titova stand out distinctly. Unlike the other participants, she uses direct visual botanical metaphors less prominently; however, it is this visual elusiveness that renders her works resonant, piercing, and aesthetically sharpened to the maximum. The artist simultaneously constructs and deconstructs, manifests and mythologises, and creates and destroys. Her collage series titled "Tove" serves as a captivating visualisation of the modern artist's thought process as they grapple with themes of life, nature, memory, cultural interactions, and the dissolution of perception boundaries regarding various substances. For instance, in her works, a wired earphone may represent both a sperm cell and a rope for tying, as well as the contour of an unidentified object. A golf club can be interpreted as a grass-cutting scythe, a contour of a fractal universe, and a blade severing a character's legs from the solid ground beneath them.

The subtly botanical metaphorical nature of her works levels all objects of memory against one another, literally endowing each object with the properties of the plant world. A cloud can become the earth from which identical bodies or body parts grow, while air can transform into the ground from which clouds arise. The objects simultaneously serve as items from the real world (coloured) and artefacts of memory, documents of the past (black and white). A dress becomes the sea, an earphone turns into the moon, and suddenly, the late British queen and a naïve monocle appear. Nevertheless, at the top of Natalia Titova's collages, flowers are always positioned, adding a hint of sorrowful hierarchy to her dynamic pluralistic rhizomatic artistic world— "Flowers above all."
The most striking aspect of these digital works is the sensation of lightness and imaginative freedom, albeit this lightness is produced by an inquisitive and critically self-reflective artist. Upon closer inspection, one can recognise the immense labour and meticulous development invested in these works, which imbue the collage compositions with the potential to resemble a Hindu abode of demigods (loka).

"On The Road" by Yulia Rotkina is an intricately organised piece of artwork. Upon encountering it, we may succumb to the charm of traditional mediums (canvas, oil), the cosy minimalism of the composition, and the soothing thickness of the brushstrokes; however, this should not obscure from us a whole range of the artist’s identities, which are masterfully concealed in the painting (like seeds in the ground) and reveal themselves, harbouring immense perceptual possibilities. It is this balance of the hidden and the manifest that structures or organises the complex attraction of engaging with the painting's message.

Firstly, one of the artist's identities is that of a critic of binary oppositions. All paired phenomena in this work undergo a process of critical reflection. It is particularly peculiar that the composition reads as a triptych: earth, sky, and the figure of a person. When we attempt to analyse the various elements of the painting in pairs, we find that there are no explicit pairs present. The artist transcends binary thinking through the active use of non-obvious trinaries. In the pair "human and nature," she adds another layer of nature. In the pair "blue and green," she introduces an ambivalent object that can be both blue and green, depending on the perspective.

Another identity of the artist is that of a synaesthetic experimenter. The minimalism of expressive means in Rotkina's work is complemented by a maximalism of perceptual approaches. For instance, the deliberate relief indicates a dynamic and emotional dimension, while the use of a limited palette of complex cool colours sets the tone for the blurring of boundaries and an asserted homogeneity of things. The third identity of the artist is that of a post-storyteller who has abandoned key elements of storytelling but preserved the essence of her narrative message through the vast possibilities of direct silence. Where she remains silent, kaleidoscopes of our viewer interpretation emerge. This work inspires and amazes with its complexity of conceptual development and unparalleled technical execution.

Ariadna Arnes finds beauty in strangeness

Trained photographer Ariadna Arnes skillfully harnesses the power of AI technology to discover and reveal a unique beauty in the strangeness that often surrounds us. She perfectly uses AI as a third eye or a third arm to create outstanding pieces of art.

Minimal Precisionism by Russell Green

If you’ve dreamed of perfect illustrations for Jack London’s novels, we've found them in 2025. Talented Russell Green calls his style “Minimal Precisionism”. Combine the lost look of one-storied America with a gentle midnight colour palette, and you've captured a perfect sense of nostalgia for places you've never been but always desired to see.