Sasha Mingia’s Mingialand in Paris

May 24, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Portfolios, Photography, Lifestyle

Sasha Mingia photographs Paris the way a migrant learns a city — in fragments, without guarantees.

Her project Mingialand in Paris is not a love letter to the French capital. It is something more tentative — a document of the fragile process of constructing a relationship with a place that does not yet feel like yours. The camera becomes a tool for orientation, for testing whether recognition is possible when nothing is familiar.

No people appear in the images. The city is emptied out, suspended, almost waiting. Streets, facades, fragments of architecture and passing light form a kind of emotional topography — a map drawn by someone still learning to see.

Each photograph is paired with a diary fragment written on the same day the image was taken. The pairing is not illustration. It is accumulation. Two parallel records of displacement, running side by side, neither explaining the other.

Elizabeth Hibbard Photography

May 02, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Portfolios, Photography, USA

Elizabeth Hibbard photographs the emotional architecture between mothers and daughters.

Now based in Los Angeles, Hibbard builds images where family portraiture and constructed scene collapse into one unstable space. Her practice moves through family, gender, performance, psychoanalysis, and the body, asking how photography can mirror the hidden structures that shape intimacy and identity.

Hibbard is interested in what remains outside the frame of the "happy" snapshot. In her work, the camera does not simply record memory. It exposes the pressure beneath it: the roles we inherit, the scripts we repeat, the way femininity is learned through daily gestures and private rituals. Spontaneity and control meet in the same image, giving her photographs a tension that feels both tender and unnerving.

“I grew up alone with her from a young age until college, and we had a very isolated, boundary-less relationship; I didn’t often feel that we were truly separate people in many ways until much later.”

Hibbard's images sit exactly on that line between closeness and separation. They stage personal history without resolving it, allowing the viewer to feel how memory, body, and family mythology continue to perform through the present.

Elizabeth Hibbard

Ala Southiick

April 30, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Illustration, Portfolios, Serbia

Ala Southiick draws what she sees, where she sees it. The Serbian illustrator and environmental artist works in plein-air: sketchbook open, pen moving, catching street life as it passes.

Her technique is rooted in speed and presence. Quick observational drawings capture characters, animals, and the quiet dramas of public space before they dissolve. The method demands a certain surrender: no corrections, no second passes, just the line and the moment.

Southiick documents her outdoor sketching workshops on TikTok, filling page after page with the faces and creatures she encounters on location or showing the process of quick sketching. The sketchbooks become a kind of visual diary, not polished, not precious, but alive with the texture of being somewhere specific.

Follow Ala Southiick

Glass hammers by Pia Hinz

April 27, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Art, Germany, France, Netherlands, Portfolios, Sculpture

Pia Hinz builds hammers that could shatter at a touch.

The German-born sculptor Pia Hinz (b. 1991) works in stained glass, not windows, but objects. Screws, traffic cones, scythes, and shopping carts. Tools and labour symbols rendered in coloured glass segments joined by visible metal lines, their industrial purpose intact but their material logic inverted.

The tension is deliberate. These are objects built for pressure, for grip, for repetition, now frozen in a medium that threatens to break under the slightest force. A hammer that cannot strike. A rope that cannot pull.

Light does the rest. It passes through the coloured surfaces and casts tinted reflections onto nearby walls and floors, extending each object beyond its physical boundaries. The sculptures occupy more space than they should, fragility expanding where force once concentrated.

Hinz works between Amsterdam, Arles, and Ardèche, moving traditional stained glass technique out of the ecclesiastical context and into the territory of the everyday. The sacred window becomes a tractor door.

Follow up artist

Sad Girls by Glam Beckett

April 22, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Illustration, NFT Art, United Kingdom, Portfolios

We've followed Glam since her first NFT project, Sad Girls Bar, went viral in 2021 with nearly $8M in volume.

Beckett draws what lingers after the party ends. The London-based illustrator works exclusively in black ink, building worlds where sadness wears its finest clothes and ennui poses like it knows you're watching.

Her monochrome compositions explore the space between beauty and darkness, romantic, erotic, heavy with nostalgia for things that may never have existed. The absence of colour is the point. Black and white strips away distraction, leaving only the emotional core: longing, melancholy, the glamour of feeling too much.

“I realised how empty and meaningless that work felt to me. I longed to create something that held real value and personal meaning. That’s when I made the decision to fully dedicate myself to art. And it turned out you don’t really need art education to become an artist.”

— Glam Beckett

Follow up artist Glam Beckett

Tallulah Dirnfeld Art

April 21, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Art, USA, Portfolios

Tallulah Dirnfeld paints the violence hidden inside being good.

The Los Angeles oil painter works in soft pinks and creams, the palette of girlhood bedrooms and ballet recitals, yet what emerges from these tender colours is something far more unsettling. Faceless figures in uniform, chrome horses frozen mid-gallop, severed braids arranged like relics, her canvases stage performed goodness as a kind of theatre in which the audience never quite knows whether they're watching devotion or dissection.

Her series "I Was Always Good" centres on the distortion that occurs when childhood memories age. Nostalgia, trauma, comfort, and fear mutate together into something both tender and threatening. The deliberate blurring in her technique mirrors this - precision giving way to soft surrealism, as if the paintings themselves are forgetting.

“Being beloved means being idealised, and being fully known is typically the price paid. It has a sharpness, almost a violent quality, along with tenderness. The beloved is exalted and even worshipped, but therefore distorted.”

— Tallulah

Follow up artist Tallulah Dirnfeld

Floaters by Dima Rebus

April 20, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Art, Portfolios

Dima Rebus paints with ice that strangers send him from around the world.

The process begins before he touches a brush. Contributors (or as Rebus calls them, “floaters”) across the globe collect water samples — from parks, alleyways, abandoned buildings — and mail them to his studio. Rebus freezes each sample with watercolour pigments, then lets it melt onto paper. The ice dictates the first layer: unpredictable blooms, mineral traces, the ghost of a place he's never been. Others arrive carrying contamination, political residue, ecological unrest — water as document as much as material.

Only then does he enter the abstract field with figurative imagery, responding to what the water left behind.

Nearly every sample arrives with a letter. Place, mood, memory, time — the contributors become co-authors before Rebus makes a single mark.

Follow up artist Dima Rebus

Gregorio Zanardi

February 26, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Art, Argentina, Portfolios, Digital Art

Something is striking about Gregorio Zanardi’s work. Born in Argentina in 2000, he’s barely in his twenties, yet the emotions in his paintings and digital pieces feel as deep as if he’d spent decades on them. That clash of youth with old-soul feeling may be the point.

Zanardi's work is most steady in portraiture, especially of older faces. These portraits aren't idealised or sentimental. They show weathered, thoughtful people with something unresolved. Wrinkled skin, eyes turned inward. Zanardi chooses faces society often ignores and puts them front and centre with blunt intensity. This follows a Latin American figurative tradition. Artists like Antonio Berni or León Ferrari used human presence as resistance, and Zanardi, whether intentionally or not, continues that line.

What separates him from simple melancholy portraiture is tension. One can describe his practice as a deliberate collision between beauty and unease, and you feel it. Harmonious compositions that carry a current of discomfort just beneath the surface. An imperfectly rendered face with something slightly off in the gaze. The work doesn't let you settle.

Worth following across NFT Platforms, and worth keeping an eye on his physical work, which you suspect may be where the most interesting surprises are still to come.

Follow up

Richard Nadler

February 11, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, Art, Craft, Illustration, Germany, Portfolios

Richard Nadler is an artist whose work is based on close observation and personal stories. His work is shaped by his father's influence, especially his lifelong love of textiles and craftsmanship - from antique Persian rugs to worn watches and handmade leather shoes.
Nadler's aesthetic belief is that surfaces hold time and closeness, and that objects carry human experience. His work links traditional craft values with contemporary digital art.

Nadler focuses on showing unseen layers of life through rooms and halls. Instead of people, he paints empty spaces as a "vacuum of presence" that feels lived-in by placing marks, textures, and light. This choice shows how memory and feeling live in places. He turns homes into stages of personal moments as joy, grief, laughter, silence and made visible by careful detail and mood. His work mixes documentary observation with poetic interpretation.

The artist works with materials both digital and physical, exploring time and handmade skill. By offering his pieces as NFTs and as embroidered versions, Nadler contrasts the instant nature of digital work with the slow, meditative pace of embroidery.

Follow up artist

Riona Buthello

January 20, 2026 by Arseny Vesnin in 2026, United Kingdom, Portfolios, Art

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

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

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

rionabuthello.com

Younguk Yi Mutant Lab

December 19, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Digital Art, South Korea, Portfolios

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

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

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

@yiyounguk

Dina Goldstein: Mistresspieces

October 31, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Portfolios, Photography, Canada

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.

Follow up

Accidental Landscapes by Mohammad Noureddini

August 29, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Portfolios, United Kingdom

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.

mohammadnoureddini.art

Kutay Yavuz: Mapping the Terrain of Memory

July 30, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Turkey, United Kingdom, Portfolios, Photography

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

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

Don’t Look Back - A Memoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@koutaist

Jochen Mühlenbrink’s fogged realities

June 16, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Germany, Portfolios

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.

jochen-muehlenbrink.com

Colourful Mind of Alyssa Stevens

June 09, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in Art, USA, Portfolios

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.

alyssastevens.com

Melancholy dipped in sunshine by Kalle Hellzen

May 23, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Illustration, Netherlands, Portfolios

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.

@artbykallehellzen

Portraits in Prism by Irina Kiro

May 16, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Illustration, Lifestyle, Portfolios

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.

irinakiro.com

Francisco Ratti

May 12, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Art, Argentina, Digital Art, Portfolios

“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

May 08, 2025 by Arseny Vesnin in 2025, Portfolios, Motioncollector

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.

sebastianmarek.com