The Immersive Hairy Worlds of Shoplifter
Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, known as Shoplifter, is debuting Xanadu at Arkansas' Format Festival – a ten‑pole, outdoor installation draped in multicolored synthetic hair that reaches up to ten meters. The work continues her signature practice of turning hair extensions into immersive, landscape‑like sculptures, a technique she refined after her breakthrough Chromo Sapiens at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Shoplifter now produces two to three large‑scale installations a year, supported by a team of assistants, and operates the permanent art center Höfu∂stö∂in in Reykjavík, which houses Chromo Sapiens and solves storage and logistics challenges.
Jeffrey Gibson: More Colors than The Eye Can See
Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw‑Cherokee artist, uses dreams, spirituality, and interdisciplinary media to create immersive installations. In 2024 he became the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale with "the space in which to place me,"...
Matthew Hansel’s Hidden Demons
Matthew Hansel’s "Morbid Delectatio" project fuses Northern Renaissance technique with Norman Rockwell‑style realism to explore the hidden, contradictory parts of human nature. He populates his canvases with grotesque creatures, cheese crowns, fruit, and 1960s nudist‑colony advertisements, turning repulsion into visual delight....
The Drawings of Femke Hiemestra Depict Fairy Tales with Looming Consequences
Femke Hiemstra, a leading figure in Pop Surrealism, creates vivid acrylic and mixed‑media works that reinterpret classic fairy‑tale scenes through animal protagonists. Her pieces combine meticulous graphite planning, layered translucent acrylics, and unconventional canvases such as vintage book covers. Drawing...
Kendall Ross Comments Directly on the Craft Vs. Art Debate
Kendall Ross, an Oklahoma City textile artist, uses massive knitted installations to blur the line between craft and fine art. Her upcoming September 2025 shows feature a 250‑square‑foot piece made from 63 sewn‑together vests, positioning knitting within museum contexts. Ross frames...
Child’s Play: The Paintings of Kayla Mahaffey
Kayla Mahaffey, a Chicago‑based painter, has carved a niche by marrying realistic portraiture with flat, cartoon‑style elements. Her 2019 solo show “Off to the Races” at Line Dot Editions marked the breakthrough where the two visual languages fully coalesced, showcasing...
For Frode Bolhuis, The Figure Contains Life’s Mysteries and Its Multitudes
Dutch sculptor Frode Bolhuis transitioned from large‑scale bronze monuments to intimate polymer‑clay figures, embracing vivid pastel colors. The new medium lets him experiment quickly, turning each figurative piece into a technicolor expression of emotion. He builds sculptures intuitively, using a...
Kyle Cobban Draws From The Unknown
Kyle Cobban, a Chicago‑based artist, gained notice at the 2022 Bulls Fest with a graphite drawing that fuses a 1990s Bulls starter jacket and neighborhood imagery. He creates small, detailed works by first assembling digital collages in Photoshop, then rendering...
Very Strange Days: The Paintings of Jenny Morgan
Jenny Morgan, a Brooklyn‑based painter, creates large‑scale oil portraits that hover between realism and abstraction, using the nude body as a vulnerable canvas. Her process involves photographic references, layered glazing, blurring, and sanding to transform flesh into color‑driven forms. Influenced...
Weightless: The Paintings of Henrik Uldalen
Norwegian painter Henrik Uldalen creates photosurrealist oil works by staging photo shoots, heavily editing the images in Photoshop, and then translating them onto canvas. His figures appear pale, floating, or contorted in impossible spaces, emphasizing a dream‑like detachment. Uldalen is...
The Embodieries of Michelle Kingdom Capture the Murky Tangle of Our Interior World
Los Angeles‑based artist Michelle Kingdom redefines embroidery as "stitched paintings," creating miniature narrative pieces that function like hand‑drawn illustrations. Drawing on her Russian‑Jewish heritage and a family steeped in craft, she uses tightly packed threads to explore themes of identity,...
Uncanny Valley: The Oil Paintings of the Late Eyvind Earle Still Have A Resounding Influence on Artists & Viewers Today
Eyelid‑spanning artist Eyvind Earle turned his mythic vision into iconic oil landscapes that still shape visual storytelling. His work for Disney, especially the hand‑painted backgrounds of Sleeping Beauty, redefined fairytale aesthetics while nearly bankrupting the studio’s animation unit. Beyond film, Earle’s linocut Christmas...
Close Encounters: The Paintings of David Rice
David Rice, a Colorado‑born painter, captures Pacific Northwest wildlife by merging field photography with layered oil techniques. His canvases feature animals draped in vibrant fabrics against faded wallpaper, granting them a regal, almost humanized aura without full anthropomorphism. By juxtaposing...
F. Scott Hess: Art History & The Dreams of a Reluctant Realist
F. Scott Hess’s new painting The Dream of Art History translates a 1978 fever dream into a sprawling canvas that stitches together iconic works from the Renaissance to the present. The piece, featured in the documentary The Reluctant Realist, reflects...
The Cross-Sectioned Paper Sculptures of Lisa Nilsson
Lisa Nilsson, a Massachusetts‑based visual artist, has revived the centuries‑old quilling technique to create life‑sized paper sculptures of human anatomical cross‑sections. Drawing on historic medical images and the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project, she painstakingly coils colored paper...