Digital artist Chris Slabber is best known for his award-winning designs of the “Haezer album cover” and “Destruction/Creation,” the latter an ink-dropped-into-water art series that was inspired by the works of Alberto Seveso. Using the same visual style in “Doppelganger,” his newest project capitalizes on the dualities of past and future, hero and coward… “The […]
Category: Experimental
Dragan Ilic Di Vogo’s Symbolic, Hallucinatory Worlds
Note: Contains nudity. Dragan Ilic Di Vogo is a Belgrade-based painter who combines fantasy imagery with surrealism in passionate, dreamlike sequences. His deserts—inhabited by warrior women, stone angels, and floating objects—are reminiscent of the bizarre, symbolic landscapes of Salvador Dalí. With an ancient poeticism, Di Vogo’s works explore the edges of consciousness by dissolving the […]
10 Photographers Who Tell Stories with Controversial Imagery
Photography has long been a window into our social psyches, capturing not only scenes of beauty, but also the hidden underbellies of human experience: decadence, struggle, violence, passion, and despair. The word “controversial” is often used to describe these artists, because they rupture and/or critique the boundaries of normativity, thereby causing discomfort. Below is a […]
Bear Kirkpatrick’s Passionate and Sacred Photography
Note: Contains nudity. Bear Kirkpatrick is a photographer who ventures deep into the wilderness, seeking “hierophanies.” The term derives from the theories of religious historian Mircea Eliade, referring to moments when the sacred realm breaks into the profane (the material, everyday world). Kirkpatrick’s portraits feature nude figures in beautiful, tortured communion with the earth. In […]
Tender Sacrifice: The Photography of Ines Kozic
Ines Kozic is a French photographer who decorates youthful bodies with symbols of sorrow, contemplation, and death. Insects are a recurring motif in her work, representing the transience of life and material processes of decay. Her more recent black and white images explore the feminine form in dark relation with the forest, drawing on fairy […]
The Morbid, Erotic Doll Photography of Mariel Clayton
Note: Contains violence and sexual references. Mariel Clayton takes humorous, erotic, and often disturbing photographs of dolls. Inspired by an encounter in a Tokyo toy shop, her images are staged within miniature rooms, inserting a peculiar mix of bawdiness and ultra-violence into seemingly innocent domestic scenes. The dolls’ fixed smiles and outrageous acts poke fun […]
The Shrouded Maidens of Helen Warner’s Surreal Portraiture
Helen Warner is a Belfast-based photographer who composes ghostly and surreal images. She describes her work as a type of “frozen theater,” where arcane events occur in unknown landscapes. Featured here is a collection of her headshots, which pair feminine features with symbols of mourning and death: flowers, shrouds, and snow adorn the faces of […]
Fish-Eyed Omens: Surreal Paintings by Hannah Faith Yata
Note: Contains nudity and sexual references. The world of Hannah Faith Yata is a psychedelic, symbolic feast. Interested in themes of feminism, environmental degradation, and morality, she produces large oil paintings of hybrid creatures in distorted worlds. Fish and fish-headed women—effectively, reverse mermaids—are recurring motifs, blurring mythology with a pained surrealism; their staring, lidless eyes […]
The Mystical Masks and Other Worlds of Léonard Condemine
Note: Contains nudity. Léonard Condemine is a French mixed-media artist interested in identity formation and alienation. Since 2010, he has been crafting cryptic masks, decorating them with feathers, mirror shards, and painted geometric shapes. Each mask is contextualized in his ethereal photographs, which show the masked figures worshipping unseen gods under star-strewn skies and in […]
Spencer Tunick’s Awe-Striking Installations of Nude Crowds
Note: Contains nudity. Spencer Tunick is an American photographer who has traveled the globe taking stunning photographs of nude crowds. Amassed and synchronized in large groups, the volunteers pose in diverse (and sometimes challenging) environments, such as public spaces in Monaco, botanical gardens in Mexico, and impressively, the Swiss glacier of Aletsch. Defying logic with […]