Colossal art

If Marija Tiurina’s latest watercolor appears to be a random mishmash of dreamy scenes, that’s because it is. The London-based illustrator (previously) recently completed “The Lockdown Project,” a dense composition inspired by dozens of submissions she collected during the first few weeks of quarantine. Complete with childhood memories, dreams, and colloquialisms, the illustration depicts a rich network of bizarre characters and fictional tales that flow organically between scenes. More

Japan-based artist Ayumi Shibata (previously) constructs intricate paper cities and natural landscapes that both fit in the palm of her hand and are expansive enough to pass through on foot. Using dozens of layers of paper for a single project, Shibata carves miniature houses, clouds, and tree-filled forests that eventually are illuminated in glass vessels, stored safely in a book, or erected in large-scale installations. The artist tells Colossal that she doesn’t use pencil outlines, in…

Enveloped by trailing vines and mosses, the dilapidated shelters that Paris-based artist Simon Laveuve crafts appear to emerge from a post-apocalyptic universe as eerie safe-havens. Often elevated aboveground, the miniature buildings feature vertical constructions with various platforms and stairs leading upward. “My pieces, for the most part, have this aspect of shelter… I like to work on the height and the inaccessible. Protection and surrender. Fallen icons and their symbolism. Resistance…

Brooklyn-based photographer Brooke DiDonato (previously) poses bodies in twisting forms, skewing the viewer’s perception of where one body ends and the next begins. DiDonato also combines subjects and scenes in surreal ways that question the division between human and nature, presenting limbs popping up from a field of sun-baked crops, or capturing a stream of bountiful flowers spilling generously out of an open spout. The above image of two men’s intertwined bodies was inspired by a…

We are honored to have worked with artist Cinta Vidal on an exclusive release of the print edition of her 2017 painting, Urban Evening, available now in The Colossal Shop. In her latest series of paintings, Catalan artist Cinta Vidal (previously here and here) takes on the vast and complicated topic of industry: its omnipresence, its normalization of detritus, its strange beauty, and the contradictions in how it both helps and hurts us. More

What if cities in the future were just industrial metropolises built upon chaotic layers of construction?

At the Direktorenhaus Museum in Berlin this past week, a solo exhibition of detailed architectural drawings by Virginia-based artist Benjamin Sack (previously) opened to the public. Titled Labyrinths, the collection of new works features vast cityscapes comprised of impossible inner-geometries. The maze-like urban maps reference musical compositions and various symbols found in cosmology. Often creating based on what he calls a “fear of blank spaces,” Sack tells Colossal that his starting…

Brooklyn-based artist Guno Park evokes the tradition of memento mori with an exquisite new drawing highlighting the precarious line between life and death. Titled “Nature of Things,” the meticulously crosshatched piece rendered in graphite stands at a striking 85 inches, portraying the oversized human figure with botanicals winding around its spinal column and through its chest. “Putting the skeleton together with vine, leaves, and flowers represents for me the power of nature and its…

british artist olivia kemp has a knack for drawing incredibly detailed, large-scale illustrations that sprawl the walls of her studio in their entirety.

Fantastically tall figures with elongated limbs and torsos inhabit the distorted, mysterious realities painted by artist Stamatis Laskos (previously). The highly stylized artworks, which extend upwards of six feet, imagine a universe marred by unknown destruction: an elderly man wades through waist-high water while fire burns in the background, a woman retrieves a human skeleton from a flood, and a self-portrait shows the artist shielding his eyes with detached hands. More