Working in the field of concept art, Simon Stalenhag has conceived a whole world. Using his homeland of Sweden as a backdrop (and more recently, California), Stalenhag merges reality with fantasy, turning coniferous forests and snow-shrouded fields into the sites of alien encounters, apocalypse scavenging, and bloody cyborgian crimes. He spent a lot of time alone in nature as a child, and as a result, his works often “depict a sense of isolation and loneliness”; in a world that resembles a dystopian near-future (or even a recent past, or an alternate timeline), solitary figures contend with wandering extraterrestrial and mechanical threats, all of which lumber or slither across the horizons like eerie, decrepit, and/or dangerous beasts. Visit Stalenhag’s website, where you can see incredible close-ups of his paintings that reveal how much detail and subtle drama he tucks into a single image.

Images © Simon Stalenhag 

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