2026-09-29 01:41:02
Earlier this month, a monumental, metallic spiral appeared on the High Line to coincide with New York Fashion Week. The elevated, art-filled public park on the West Side of Manhattan runs from Gansevoort Street near the Whitney Museum of American Art to 34th Street near Hudson Yards. Commissioned by Bulgari as part of its Serpenti Infinito series, which celebrates its famous Serpenti collection through artistic partnerships, the temporary installation invited visitors to walk through an enormous coil titled “auroBOROS: Urban Memory and Collective Dream.”
The brainchild of artists Marco Canevacci and Yena Young, who helm the studio Plastique Fantastique, “auroBOROS” spent nearly two weeks wedged beneath a raised building. Its title is drawn from the ancient ouroboros motif of a snake eating its own tail as a metaphor for the continuous cycles of life—a nod to Bulgari’s snake-themed jewelry line—and the site added a playful tension to the piece, as it appeared to support the overhead structure.
“auroBOROS” marks the first time Plastique Fantastique has exhibited in the U.S. Earlier installations along a similar theme include iterations of an architectonic gold loop titled “RINGdeLUXE,” which has encircled bridges with the appearance of a kind of cosmic portal. See more on the studio’s Instagram.
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2026-09-28 22:45:02
In the Buddhist tradition, mandalas are devotional images that represent the universe, their precise geometry and motifs depicting holy realms and a sense of order through symbolic references to the elements and astrology. Tibetan Buddhist monks painstakingly create colorful sand renditions as part of their mindfulness practice. Once complete, the pieces are ritualistically destroyed—the sand is customarily returned to moving water—to illustrate the impermanence and transience of life and the cosmos.
For artist Mu Pan, the mandala inspires the foundation of a series of vivid works on paper. In his current solo exhibition, Micro MUniverse at Hashimoto Contemporary, the Brooklyn-based artist composes explosive, eccentric, narrative scenes rendered at what the gallery describes as “a molecular level.”
The collection draws on a Chinese Buddhist adage that a single cup of water contains countless lifeforms, and for that reason, care must be taken in consuming it. Mu delves into a world of fantasy and symmetry, where animals, humans, and plants converge and hybridize in surreal configurations. Some become nearly abstract; others are uncanny, even slightly grotesque. The figures are at turns ecstatic, devious, and serene: black-winged skeletons meet sublime beings in “18 Angels,” and a dramatic scene of woodland creatures divinely erupts in “Burning Rabbit.”
Many of the works are less than a foot wide, with the exception of one painting on panel called “4 Brutes” that’s two feet across. Line, form, and expressions are therefore composed in incredible detail. The artist says, “I want to focus on the concept of being small, because whatever is small actually contains way more than it appears. Therefore, each small image is like a drop of blood, and each drop of blood contains multiple universes.”
Micro MUniverse continues through October 10 in New York City. See more on the artist’s Instagram.
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2026-09-26 02:50:42
Built throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the Aylesbury Estate is an enormous public housing complex in South East London that at its peak, boasted 11,000 residents. Like other social projects of this kind, Aylesbury has struggled with violence and vandalism throughout its run, and in 2005, local officials decided to demolish the estate and rebuild in phases rather than rehabilitate the existing structures.
Living and working in South East London for nearly four decades, Harriet Mena Hill was familiar with the area, but it wasn’t until 2018 when she was commissioned to teach a summer program for young residents that she really engaged with the project. She made large portraits from wool, blending dyed roving to delineate windows, shape bowed electrical wires, and even mimic graffiti spray-painted on outdoor walls.
Forming the series Soft Concrete, the textile pieces cast a largely gray environment of stone and steel in soft fiber. The body of work, Hill says, was a “repositioning of how the estate is perceived. Historically, it has been widely portrayed in the media as violent and intimidating, as a place without hope.”
In contrast, Soft Concrete “presents the estate as a place of living and community. From a distance, the portraits look like photographs or realistic paintings, but on closer inspection, the material reveals itself to be wool, hand blended for subtle colour mixing used to depict small active details of domestic life,” the artist adds.
Hill is broadly interested in the ways that communities and the objects they interact with can become vessels for shared memories, so when the estate began to be razed in 2020, she started to collect fragments of concrete from the construction site. “It was a direct response to the situation of residents who were required to stay at home as the demolition of adjoining blocks, the homes of their former neighbours, continued throughout lockdown, in spite of wider restrictions,” she tells Colossal.
Before its destruction, several tenants had advocated for renovations rather than demolition, hoping to preserve the community and homes they’d built. In an interview with the BBC in 2023, long-time resident Aysen Dennis lamented being forced to leave the estate after 30 years. Local administrators found her new housing in central London, but it wasn’t the same. “The council gave me everything I asked for. It’s on a high floor. There’s lots of light. I can see the park,” Dennis said. “But it’s not my home.”
Intimate in scale, Hill’s paintings glimpse hallways and pockets of windows that are similarly sliced from their larger contexts, the ragged edges of concrete framing the largely domestic spaces. Part of the ongoing series titled The Aylesbury Fragments, the scenes capture the run-down infrastructure of buildings left standing during the phased reconstruction process.
Although regeneration began in 2013, it’s less than half complete, and Hill has completed more than 150 paintings to date. As demolition continues, she adds to her ever-changing collection of concrete remnants. “I live with the unpainted pieces for months, sometimes years, getting to know their shape before I begin working on them,” the artist says, noting that as long as there are buildings still under construction, she’ll continue painting these small tributes to the community once housed within their walls.
Hill has exhibitions slated for London and across the U.K. throughout 2027. Follow along on Instagram.
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2026-09-25 20:58:54
Like the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin, the first time I found myself in front of a painting by the Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo (1908-1963), I was stunned. Who was this elegant owl-figure with dainty fingers and feet? What was animating the creaturely machine at her side with tentacle-like brushes as hands? And, would I ever be able to look away?
Feeling mesmerized and awe-struck by Varo’s Surrealist visions isn’t an uncommon position to find oneself in. A new release from Louisiana Channel interviews three artists and two writers—Schweblin being one—about Varo’s influence, particularly her precise approach to alchemy and visualizing the thin veil between the physical and spiritual world. Interspersing artworks and commentary creates an insightful tapestry of a singular artist and her enduring legacy. Watch “Remedios Varo: The Painter of Magic” below, and learn more about the artist previously on Colossal.
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2026-09-25 03:02:09
“I try to avoid playing it safe or going for the obvious. Instead, I look at plants from a different perspective and express them in my own way,” South Korean artist Taehyoung Maria Jeon says about a fantastical series of illustrations. “Ironically, having rules is what gives me the freedom to experiment with plant shape.”
Although she’s trained as a printmaker and continues to build compositions in layers, Jeon turns to digital methods as she reimagines the specimens cohabitating in her apartment, beginning with leaves and stems before venturing into surreal terrain. Purple veins, red outlines, and a smattering of stars appear on the imagined life forms, their vivid color palettes furthering their sense of the uncanny.
Titled Plant Series, the project “started as a personal challenge to fill a square canvas with plants, playing with shapes and composition to pack everything in as much as possible,” she says. “As the series continues, the drawings evolve and the nuances shift, but at its heart, it is always about composition, balance, colour, and shape—and hopefully sending out positive vibes, too.”
Dozens of illustrations from the series are compiled in Folium, Jeon’s first monograph from Volume. The publisher functions like Kickstarter and asks readers to back the project before printing. You can reserve your copy on Volume’s website, and find more from the artist on Instagram.
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2026-09-24 22:57:11
Delicate waves, mysterious fissures, and diffused lightning set some of the scenes in Sarah Lee’s dreamy landscape paintings. Moons with strangely direct beams of light and supple mountains cradled by lakes and forests are tinged with magical realism. Most of the works seen here are part of Lee’s current solo exhibition titled Deeper at Albertz Benda, in which the artist highlights different ecosystems and the nature of clarity and concealment. She often titles her works in reference to the colors she employs, such as “Emerald Sky” and “Red Meadow in Mist.”
These apparently “empty” landscapes nod to the romantic Western tradition of seascapes and broad, open expanses that pandered to a problematic colonialist mindset, such as that of Manifest Destiny. John O’Sullivan, who coined the term, wrote that Americans possessed the fundamental right to “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us…” In Lee’s oil paintings, a gallery statement says, “the landscape pushes back.”
In the misty, fuzzy edges of glaciers, glowing skies, and mountain peaks, the artist imbues a nuanced sense of the uncanny. “There is a distinct feeling that more is hidden in the scene than what meets the eye: in the recesses of the water, underneath the ice, obscured by an outcropping of coral,” the gallery says. The light perhaps shines a little too brightly or a gap opens up ominously in a field of ice. “Before Dark” draws our attention to the serene surface of a lake, and what we can see is beautiful, yet one wonders if we’re witnessing the calm before the storm.
Lee harnesses the power of the unknown, examining the way nature both nourishes us and is the ultimate authority. Humans need clean water, food, and fresh air, and we rely on these things even as our collective actions cause the environment harm along with, paradoxically, ourselves. The artist’s paintings provide a kind of filter through which to see this contradiction, as the land and water are elements we fundamentally rely on but cannot control.
Deeper continues through October 10 in New York. See more on the artist’s Instagram.
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