Dina Goldstein: Mistresspieces

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.

Accidental Landscapes by Mohammad Noureddini

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.

When Data Dreams: Messi, Anadol, and the Poetry of a Goal

In a fusion that blurs the line between memory and machine, Christie’s, Inter Miami CF, and global football legend Lionel Messi have unveiled a collaboration with Refik Anadol - the generative artist known for transforming data into emotion.

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.

Renault 17 Electric by – Ora ïto

With the release of the R17 Electric Restomod X, the French designer — long hailed as a product design enfant terrible (and one of the many reasons I started design blogging 20 years ago) — has firmly shifted gears, establishing himself as a visionary in the realm of mobility design. This bold reinterpretation of a classic Renault coupe marks not just a new chapter in automotive aesthetics but a deeper evolution of his multidisciplinary practice.

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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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.

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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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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.

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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

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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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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Art of Khamdamov Radmirdjon

Khamdamov Radmirdjon is an artist who works in various media and genres, such as painting, drawing, watercolour, monumental art, and oil painting. He was born in 1979 in Chardzhou, Turkmenistan, and developed a passion for art from an early age. He has participated in numerous art exhibitions and events, both nationally and internationally, and has won several awards and recognitions for his work. He has also visited and learned from some of the world's most renowned museums and artists, developing his own unique and expressive style.

When the artist just began his practice, he thought that there was no place for subject and figurative painting in the contemporary art world. It seemed at the time that this was often because the viewer who wants to appear trendy usually tends to go to so-called “fashionable” places to seem advanced. However, it never stopped Khamdamov from mastering his practice.

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Choosing a proper model

The process of choosing a “model” to depict in an image is always a very responsible part for any professional painter, who has their strong visual language. For Khamdamov, it is always important to combine oriental motives and selfness in his oeuvre.

He pays great attention to compositions with fruits, which is typical of the Eastern tradition. Pomegranates often become objects of his creative interest. This fruit is recognized as a symbol of Central Asia. It is quite difficult to imagine many Eastern dishes without it, many of which are also, in a way, works of art.

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The composition is especially worth highlighting – Khandamov adheres to the academic principle with a clearly defined centre and wings. The artist notes that this approach is ideal for interior painting. A typical collector of such works wants to see more joy and abundance in his home, and Khandamov's canvases just emphasise this point.

From a technical point of view, it is worth noting that the artist deliberately chose the format of realism, and from a technical point of view, all the paintings are painted with glazes, which brings Khandamov closer to the old masters whom he loves so much. In conclusion, it is worth noting that the work of Radmir Khamdamov compares favorably with many of his contemporaries in terms of monumentality and choice of themes. The artist deliberately adheres to the academic path, where skill and symbolism reveal the personality of the author.

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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