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09/09/2026

At the Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki, Argentine artist Leandro Erlich turned architecture into an optical illusion with 'Bâtiment'— a life-size building façade reflected in a huge mirror lying on the floor.

Visitors could lie down, climb, hang and pose on the structure, creating the surreal illusion that gravity had disappeared.

Erlich’s work is less about simply looking at art and more about becoming part of it. His installations use mirrors, architecture, perspective and familiar spaces to make us question what is real — while encouraging something much simpler: Play!

For a moment, the museum became a building where the laws of physics didn't quite apply.


08/09/2026

Pakistani artist Sajid Amiri creates remarkably realistic portraits and figures using nothing but industrial wire mesh. Born in Kharmang Pari, Baltistan, Amiri studied painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, where an assignment experimenting with unconventional materials led him to discover his distinctive technique.

He cuts, layers and hand-stitches sheets of mesh, using the density of the material and the way light passes through it to create shadows, tones and astonishing depth. The result sits somewhere between painting, sculpture and light art.

His subjects have included Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat and animals, while his work has been exhibited in Pakistan and collected internationally.

From a distance, the mesh almost disappears. Look closer and you realise the image is made entirely from thousands of tiny pieces of metal.


07/09/2026

Thomas Deininger turns rubbish into remarkably lifelike birds — but the illusion only works from the right angle.

His sculptures are built from discarded plastic, old toys, beach debris and everyday objects, painstakingly arranged with hot glue into anamorphic forms. From one precise viewpoint, the chaotic pile suddenly becomes a recognisable bird; move around it and the illusion falls apart, revealing the surprising materials underneath.

Birds are a recurring subject for Deininger, who is also a keen birdwatcher and naturalist. His work transforms the waste of consumer culture into images of the natural world, creating a striking contrast between beauty and pollution.

Is it recycling, optical illusion, sculpture — or all three?

06/09/2026

Dennis Hong, director of UCLA’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), explores the poetic side of engineering in 'The Lightness of Submission'.

Blending robotics and performance, Hong transforms mechanical precision into fluid motion—where robots move like dancers balancing between gravity and grace.

The work challenges how we perceive technology, emotion, and control, reminding us that innovation can also be art in motion.


Source: criticalplayground

06/09/2026

A painting stolen by the N***s during the Second World War is finally set to return to the family of its rightful owner.

"Portrait of a Lady", an 18th-century Baroque painting by Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi, disappeared after it was taken from the collection of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker in 1940.

The painting resurfaced unexpectedly in 2025, when it was spotted in photographs of a house for sale in Mar del Plata, Argentina. It was hanging in the home of Patricia Kadgien, daughter of former N**i SS financier Friedrich Kadgien, who fled to Argentina after the war.

An Argentine judge has now ordered the work returned to Marei von Saher, Goudstikker’s sole heir.

More than 1,000 works were stolen from Goudstikker’s collection. Many were recovered and returned after the war, but others remain missing.

More than 80 years later, the search for stolen art continues.

05/09/2026

When Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall and called it 'The Comedian' in 2019, he probably didn’t expect the art world to go completely bananas.
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The work, first presented at Art Basel Miami Beach, became one of contemporary art’s most recognisable provocations, and since then, artists have responded with their own banana-related works, some seemingly mocking Cattelan, others perhaps celebrating the sheer brilliance of making a banana into a cultural phenomenon.
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But the banana was already a star of Pop Art.
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Andy Warhol famously put a peelable banana sticker on the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s 1967 debut album. Cattelan’s banana therefore sits within a much longer history of turning an everyday fruit into an icon.
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So are these artists making fun of Cattelan — or proving his point?

04/09/2026

Cuban puppeteer Víctor Ariosa, aka Galeria Morionet, has turned painting into a live puppet performance.
His wooden marionette, Morionet, holds the brush, dips it into the paint and recreates famous artworks on tiny canvases — while dancing to music along the way.

Ariosa created Morionet in 2018 after being challenged to make a puppet that could paint. Today, his performances combine puppetry, painting, theatre and street art, with Ariosa controlling every movement from behind the miniature stage.

Based in Mexico City, he has become a familiar presence around Coyoacán, where audiences gather to watch the impossible-looking process unfold in real time.

Is the artist Ariosa, the puppet Morionet — or both?

03/09/2026

Myrsini Alexandridi is a Greek architect, painter and ceramic artist, born in 1991 and now based in Stockholm.
Her architectural training strongly informs her practice, where the humble ceramic tile becomes both canvas and building block.
She combines Mediterranean colours, Greek landscapes, traditional patterns and architectural forms with a distinctly Scandinavian sense of simplicity.

Alexandridi hand-paints each tile individually, often using enamel colours and a technique related to pointillism.
She first divides her composition into a grid of individual tiles, then reconstructs the fragmented image as a larger whole.
The result sits beautifully between painting, architecture, design and ceramics.

Her exhibitions include a solo show at Galleri Hind in Stockholm, Ceramic & Art in Athens, 60 Days of Design in Patras and A Bizarre Dinner in Aegina. In 2026 she is participating in the Biennale of Contemporary Ceramics in Rhodes and the Kakelhuset group exhibition in Stockholm.

Her work is a wonderful reminder that a tile can be much more than a surface—it can become a fragment of architecture, memory and cultural identity.

01/09/2026

Marco Grassi is an Italian painter born in 1987, known for pushing oil painting into an extraordinary territory between hyperrealism, surrealism and symbolism. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and developed his technique through an intense study of the Old Masters, particularly their subtle modelling and Renaissance sfumato.

His paintings are built through painstaking layers and extremely fine brushwork. Skin, hair, feathers and tiny variations of colour are rendered with such precision that the paintings can initially look photographic. But Grassi is interested in more than copying reality: his figures often undergo strange metamorphoses, bringing together the human body, nature and symbolic imagery. Some paintings can take months or even more than a year to complete.

Grassi has exhibited internationally, including at the Italian Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia and Art Basel, as well as solo exhibitions in London, Los Angeles, Berlin and elsewhere.

The woman embracing the swan in the painting you mention immediately evokes the ancient myth of Leda and the Swan. In Greek mythology, Zeus transformed himself into a swan and approached Leda, the queen of Sparta. The story has inspired artists for centuries—from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Cézanne and Dalí—because of its mixture of beauty, transformation, desire and the unsettling relationship between human and divine.

Grassi's painting is oil on canvas, 150 × 160 cm, but the swan makes the classical reference particularly compelling. His contemporary hyperrealism brings an ancient myth into an almost photographic present, while leaving the viewer to decide whether the scene represents seduction, transformation, danger—or all three.

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