Martin Bonnevier is a digital creator, builds surreal, atmospheric scenes almost entirely through Midjourney. His work has been called a “visual apocalypse”—a strange middle ground between digital collage and fine art, where rich patterns, clashing colors, and nightmarish juxtapositions replace any interest in photorealism.

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Christoph Niemann is a German-born illustrator, artist, and author whose work has appeared on dozens of covers for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The New York Times Magazine.

Born in 1970, he studied in Stuttgart before moving to New York in 1997, and he has since become one of the most recognizable visual voices of his generation—inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2010 and profiled in the Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design in 2017.

What began as a weekly visual column called Abstract Sunday in The New York Times Magazine later found a second life on Instagram, where Niemann shares the same restless, playful experiments: everyday objects paired with simple drawings, optical illusions, and animations that turn perception inside out. The work is funny, precise, and quietly philosophical—less about showing off technique than about catching the mind in the act of seeing.

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Matthew Woodson aka Ghostco, is a Chicago-based illustrator with a background in natural history and psychology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is defined by a cinematic, atmospheric tension—images that feel like the quiet second before something breaks.

He is perhaps best known for his limited-edition screen prints for Mondo, including posters for Daredevil, Vertigo, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. His practice is built on compressing the emotional weight of a story into a single, deliberate frame.

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Cristina Ardelean builds worlds that feel like memories you can’t quite place—dreamlike, cinematic, and just unsettling enough to stay with you. Working under the name ‘black.ai.butterfly’, she treats AI not as a shortcut or a gimmick but as a creative collaborator, a strange mirror for translating emotion into image. The name itself is a manifesto of sorts: black for the unknown and the shadow, AI for the tool we’re all still learning to hold, and butterfly for metamorphosis—the act of becoming something else entirely.

Her work lives in the space between beauty and distortion. Surreal landscapes, impossible love stories, figures that seem to hover between the human and the artificial—these are not experiments in what the software can do, but attempts to make you feel something before you understand it. She grew up in Eastern Europe, where beauty and difficulty shared the same frame, and that contrast still shapes her visual language: shadows, silence, tension, the sense that something is about to shift. Her process starts with a mood, not a concept—a song, a color, a sentence—and she discards most of what the AI generates, keeping only what carries the emotional weight she’s after.

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There is a particular kind of quiet that lives inside an architectural rendering before the building exists. It is the silence of a space that has been imagined but not yet built, lit by a sun that has not yet risen.

Ali Sadeghi works inside that silence. Based in Tehran, he moves between architecture and 3D visualization—two disciplines that, at their best, are not really separate at all. One draws the structure; the other draws the feeling of standing inside it.

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Quantum Visions is an Australian artist creating retro-inspired sci-fi artworks. The work explores dreamlike landscapes, nostalgia, human connection, and mysteries that exist just beyond the edge of reality.

The aesthetic leans toward the kind of sci-fi that feels remembered rather than predicted—soft-edged, atmospheric, and carrying a sense of quiet wonder.

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Austin Bell, a photographer originally from North Carolina whose work turns ordinary urban surfaces into something close to abstract art.

He is best known for a project that began in 2017 when he first visited Hong Kong and noticed how the city’s outdoor basketball courts stood out against the vertical density—flat, brightly colored, and almost hidden among the buildings. Over four winter visits and roughly 140 days of shooting, he used a drone to photograph all 2,549 outdoor basketball courts across Hong Kong, often capturing more than a hundred in a single day. The series, Shooting Hoops, became a photobook and an exhibition at Blue Lotus Gallery, and the images read like concrete crop circles—geometric, saturated, and strangely beautiful from above.

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ChillGrid is an AI-focused art curator and creator. The artist behind it describes the work as “Surreal and Sublime Art” and creates dreamlike, cosmic visuals—often featuring astronauts, space scenes, and ethereal landscapes.

The visuals are typically generated using AI tools such as Leonardo.ai and ImagineArt, with motion added through platforms like Google Veo. Recurring themes include interstellar journeys, dreamscapes, and a sense of peaceful wonder, frequently tagged with words like “interstellar,” “peace,” and “dreamlike”.

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Rune Fisker is a a Copenhagen-based Danish illustrator and animator. He is a graduate of Danmarks Designskole (the Royal Danish Academy of Design), where he earned a Master’s degree in visual communication in 2005.

He is known for a dynamic, abstract, and surrealist style that plays with geometry, line, and tone, creating subconscious scenes where distorted characters entangle with phantom environments hinged between fiction and reality.

His client list includes Apple, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, Cartoon Network, and The New York Times . He also runs an animation studio called Benny Box with his brother Esben Fisker, producing work for advertising and TV. Rune is represented by Finnish agency Agent Pekka for advertising projects and balances editorial, commercial, and animation work.

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Joonas Benjamin шы a cinematic AI visual director and creative director who has been working in the field since 2017 and with AI since 2022. He creates surreal AI videos and content using tools including Midjourney, Freepik, Magnific AI, Topaz Labs, Kling, Photoshop, and CapCut. His stated aim is to “explore emotion at the crossroads of human creativity and machine intelligence”.

His work centers on ethereal, otherworldly visuals — floating astronauts, surreal landscapes, moonlit piano scenes, and cinematic portal imagery. He has collaborated with artists in the music industry, creating launch visualizers for Rebelution and music videos for The Hip Abduction. His content has accumulated over 60 million views and more than 158,000 followers. He also teaches a three-step creative process called ARC, sharing prompts, tools, and workflows behind his visual work.

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Meet Maris, a digital artist who creates surreal, dream-inspired fantasy artwork. Her work is characterized by luminous moons, soft billowing clouds, cascading rainbow light, and ethereal shimmer—visions drawn directly from her dreams and daydreams.

Her aesthetic centers on a sparkling, otherworldly magic that she describes as “turning intangible dream visions into tangible art”. Recurring motifs include glowing moons and celestial bodies, iridescent rainbow effects, and soft, luminous cloudscapes. She uses tools including Midjourney for AI-assisted generation, along with Etsy for selling prints.

Her work is available as prints, canvas wall art, and home decor items including tapestries and tote bags.

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Raphaël Lacoste is a Senior Art Director and illustrator based in Montreal, Canada. He is one of the most recognized art directors in the video game industry, having worked at Ubisoft on titles including Prince of Persia and the Assassin’s Creed franchise . He won two VES Awards — one in 2006 for his work on Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and another in 2017 for Assassin’s Creed Origins.

Lacoste also worked extensively in film as a matte painter and senior concept artist on features such as Terminator Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Death Race, Immortals, Repo Men, and Jupiter Ascending. In 2009 he returned to the game industry as Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts Montreal and Ubisoft, later serving as Brand Art Director on the Assassin’s Creed franchise. After many years with the series, he joined Haven Studios as Senior Artistic Director alongside some of the original creators of Assassin’s Creed.

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His visual style is known for sweeping, monumental scale and rich historical detail, blending realism with high fantasy and classic science fiction . He has cited influences including 19th-century Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, and his work often evokes that tradition through digital painting and matte painting techniques. A retrospective art book, WORLDS: The Art of Raphaël Lacoste, was published in 2020, collecting fifteen years of his personal and professional work.

Andreion de Castro is a London-based designer and creative coder born in 1997, whose practice sits at the intersection of typography, motion design, and computational art.

He specialises in creative coding—using algorithms and programming to generate visual outcomes—with a strong focus on generative typography, interactive animations, and motion illustrations. His work has been commissioned by clients including The Telegraph, Financial Times, O2, Nothing, Prada Beauty, The Verge, and Springer Nature.

De Castro’s personal projects often translate music, film, and cultural influences into motion. His “POEMS” series draws from lyrics by artists like Frank Ocean, Sufjan Stevens, and Tame Impala, with the stated intent of evoking emotion rather than merely displaying technical skill. The “Creative Coding Explorations” series, spanning multiple volumes with over 1,000 animations shared, focuses on organic movement within heavy compositions, created entirely in Blender using Python scripts. He has said his creative process is intuitive and expressive, aiming to create work that feels emotionally substantial and resonates with viewers.

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Tarn Leith is a freelance concept artist who works under the handle TJL Art.

His creative output centers on character design and science fiction concepts, often featuring hard-surface elements. One known piece, “Celestial Death Knight,” was created for a Chroma Corps challenge using Photoshop, blending character design with science fiction and hard-surface aesthetics. The piece received positive engagement from peers in the concept art community.

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Benjamin Sack is an American artist who received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011, graduating Magna Cum Laude . Working primarily with pen and ink, he describes himself as a “Composer of worlds,” using a range of geometric forms to construct illustrations of extraordinary intricacy . His work explores architecture as a vehicle for expressing uncommon perspectives—from harsh angular arrangements to soft, billowing curves, each piece conveys a profound sense of space and scale.

His creative influences draw from historical cartography, symphonic orchestration, architectural drawing, and extensive travel . He has stated that he derives inspiration from art history, classical music, the sciences, history, and literature, and his works have been described as “symphonies of ink” . His process seeks a harmony between reason and intuition, turning inward to explore new worlds of form.

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Sack has exhibited widely, with solo shows at venues including Direktorenhaus in Berlin, Numeroventi in Florence, and Galeria Ethra in Mexico City . His work has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions at Robert Fontaine Gallery in Miami, StolenSpace Gallery in London, and various art fairs including SCOPE and Art Miami . In 2019 he was awarded the graphics prize at the International Arts Festival sponsored by the Museum of Russian Art, where he also received a solo exhibition.

Evgeny Vagin is a contemporary Russian landscape painter and a member of the Union of Artists of Russia. Born in 1985 in the village of Balakirevo in the Vladimir region, he graduated from the art and graphics faculty of Vladimir State University in 2008 and currently lives in Gus-Khrustalny, where he teaches at a children’s art school . His work has been shown in regional, national, and international exhibitions, and in 2017 he received the Grand Prix at the international competition “Star Rain”.

Vagin’s paintings are devoted almost entirely to the Russian landscape—old streets, provincial houses, village corners, and the quiet beauty of towns like Vladimir, Suzdal, Gorokhovets, and Plyos . He works in a realistic manner rooted in the tradition of Russian lyrical landscape painting, while borrowing coloristic and compositional devices from early twentieth-century Impressionism . His compositions often place the foreground in shadow and let the distance glow with warm light, drawing the viewer’s eye toward that illuminated space.

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What distinguishes Vagin’s approach is the search for the extraordinary within the ordinary. He speaks of catching a particular ray of sun on a road or the way light falls on a crooked fence, and many of his viewers write that they have passed the same spot a hundred times without noticing it until seeing his painting . His palette is bright and optimistic, and he describes his aim as holding emotion between realism and impressionism rather than sliding into dryness . He paints en plein air, traveling with his easel through old Russian towns, trying to capture a disappearing world before it vanishes.

Anatol Knotek is a Vienna-based artist and visual poet whose work sits at the intersection of language and image. Words, letters, and short phrases become his raw material — he turns them into objects, installations, and paintings rather than treating them as something merely to be read. He has said he doesn’t consider himself a writer in the classical sense; what draws him is the physicality of language, the short phrase, the play with its shape.

Knotek’s visual poetry is minimal and often built around a single word or a brief sentence that he takes apart, rotates, cuts, or transforms into a physical thing. He works with wooden letters, fabric, acrylic, typewriters, and digital formats. One of his best-known pieces, “the solution,” shows the word “problem” losing its letters one by one until only “poem” remains on the wall — a work that later reached a wider audience through a collaboration with Cos.

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He exhibits internationally, and his concrete and visual poems appear in journals, anthologies, and school textbooks. He makes handmade books in small editions, along with apps and text-based animations. His palette is almost always reduced to black and white — something he has explained through his color blindness, which in his youth pushed him away from painting and toward conceptual objects.

Heavy Thoughts and Trust Issues sound like things you might struggle to explain to someone. For Bruno Cæsar, known as Taki, they become the starting points for surreal images. The Brazilian visual artist works with digital collage and photo manipulation, turning emotional tensions into scenes that feel familiar in their mood, even when their logic is impossible.

His work has the pull of nostalgia without settling into simple comfort. Photographic fragments become part of another reality, where the tension between freedom and restriction—or personal choice and a sense of inevitability—takes a visible form. The strangeness gives those ideas room to breathe rather than reducing them to a straightforward illustration.

Taki’s titles keep the emotional stakes close. Heavy Thoughts points toward the weight of an inner life; Trust Issues names the difficulty of opening yourself to someone else. They offer a way into the work without supplying a complete explanation, leaving the viewer to bring their own associations to the image.

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An angry bunny and a character called Happy Gog belong to the same playful world in Goes’s paintings. The Chinese artist brings the energy of graffiti into character-based work, using spray paint on canvas alongside experiments in oil pastel on board. Even the titles suggest a world where contradictory moods can comfortably live together.

Color gives that world its momentum. In Pastel Dream｜Orange, bright, clashing hues overlap and stack, bringing the intensity of street art into a painted composition. Rather than separating graffiti from studio painting, Goes lets their different textures and approaches meet.

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The newer series KYOT takes inspiration from fairy tales, dreamscapes, and personal experiences. Working in oil pastel, Goes shifts toward an imaginative territory shaped by both invented stories and lived moments. It is a different route into the same characterful practice—one that leaves room for fantasy without losing its personal starting point.

These characters are not confined to a single surface. Goes also explores toy-related collaborations, extending the work beyond paintings into another form. Across those experiments, the appeal is the meeting of playful subjects and energetic materials: a bunny may sound sweet, but this one arrives with an attitude and a coat of spray paint.

A cheerful television presenter, an animated squirrel, and a picture that looks as though it has been copied from an old VHS tape. In Wiktor Stribog’s world, these reassuring ingredients become the beginning of something deeply unsettling. The Warsaw-based multimedia artist works with animation, illustration, music, and film, making familiar things feel strange enough that you begin to distrust them.

His best-known project, Kraina Grzybów TV—Mushroom Land TV—looks like a children’s educational broadcast recovered from another reality. Its central series, Smile Guide, introduces a young presenter named Agatka and her squirrel companion, Małgosia. But the lessons refuse to behave like lessons, and the comforting format slips into surreal psychological horror. The faded television aesthetic is not simply nostalgic; it makes the experience feel like a half-remembered childhood programme that was never quite safe to watch.

Stribog built the project’s scripts, music, animation, editing, and effects himself, with friends helping bring it to life. He wanted to create something viewers could not stop thinking about—an idea that would spread because people felt compelled to share it. Beneath the apparent disorder was a carefully constructed experiment in expectation, drawing on internet folklore, memes, and unsettling video imagery.

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A swimming pool after dark becomes a different place in Paul Ferney’s paintings. The water glows against the surrounding night, and swimmers become softened shapes beneath the surface. These oil paintings capture more than a summer activity—they hold onto the feeling of a moment you wish could last a little longer.

Ferney paints with rich color, simplified strokes, and visible texture, leaving out the details that a photograph might insist on keeping. That looseness gives his scenes the quality of memory: you remember the light, the water, and the pleasure of being there, even when everything else has faded. His work is less concerned with recording an exact instant than preserving what made it worth remembering.

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Raised in northern Utah, Ferney lived in California and Paris before settling in New York. Those places remain part of his painting—the open landscapes of Utah, the streets of Paris, and the California coast. Swimming pools bring his interests in people, light, and water together in one intimate setting.

There is a lovely contradiction behind Moonlight: he first painted it during a New York blizzard, between trips outside to play in the snow. He later painted a larger version to get the sky and the pool’s glow just right. A warm summer night, worked out in the middle of winter, feels perfectly suited to an artist whose subject is as much recollection as observation.

Halloween in the 1960s and 1970s was a neighborhood affair, filled with homemade decorations, school costume parades, and children heading out after dark with pillowcases ready for candy.

For many kids, dressing up meant a Ben Cooper or Collegeville costume from the local drugstore: a thin plastic mask, a fragile rubber band, and a vinyl smock with the character’s name or face printed across it. They were hardly comfortable, but they captured the moment. Batman, Casper, and classic monsters gave way to Star Wars, Sesame Street, and KISS as popular culture changed.

h/t: vintag.es

Groups of children wandered from house to house, collecting candy in brown paper bags and pillowcases. Alongside candy bars, Pixy Stix, and Necco Wafers, they might find homemade popcorn balls, caramel apples, cookies—or the occasional disappointing box of raisins.

Cardboard cutouts filled the windows, honeycomb pumpkins decorated the rooms, and plastic figures glowed on porches. Candlelit jack-o’-lanterns waited on the steps. At school, costume parades and apple bobbing kept the celebration going.

It was Halloween on a smaller scale, remembered through simple details: the awkward mask, the heavy candy bag, and the familiar street made strange for one night.

Marius Sperlich turns the human face into a stage for strange, sharply conceived visual jokes.

Lips, teeth, eyes, and skin become the settings for miniature scenes that sit somewhere between beauty photography and surreal sculpture. His close-ups make you look twice—not simply because they are unusual, but because a familiar expression or phrase suddenly takes on a physical form.

There is a mischievous streak running through the work. Eye Bag Couture, Tooth Fairy, LOVE SUCKS, and Pharmagiano begin with recognizable words and associations, then push them into unexpected territory. Beauty, food, money, medicine, and romantic disappointment share the same small stage. The titles are part of the joke, giving each image a second meaning once its initial strangeness has caught your attention.

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Roee Idah makes digital collages that look like memories from a world that never existed. Figures drawn from vintage photographs stand beneath enormous planets, while familiar landscapes open onto skies that belong somewhere far beyond Earth. The clothes and photographic textures recall the past; the surroundings make time and distance impossible to place.

What gives these scenes their atmosphere is the contrast between small human moments and an immense universe. A solitary person occupies the foreground, but a celestial body commands the horizon. The figures bring intimacy to the compositions, turning cosmic spectacle into something quieter—a scene you can imagine stepping into, even when its geography makes no sense.

Idah brings these fragments together with enough precision that the impossible feels surprisingly natural. Rather than exposing the seams of the collage, he creates a continuous space where archival imagery and imagined worlds seem to belong together. The result sits somewhere between a remembered photograph and a dream of another planet.

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Charles Lopez creates cinematic images of a lone silhouette in vast, haunting landscapes. His work is about solitude, and he presents it as beautiful rather than sad.

His scenes read like stills from a film that doesn’t exist. A plane sits abandoned in a dark field. The Eiffel Tower sinks into the sea, the Colosseum floats in fog, and the Empire State Building glows red through the trees. One figure moves through all of these worlds, and every one of them is lost and beautiful.

The landscapes are huge and indifferent. He shows the pyramids at dusk, a dark field under a storm, a mountain burning red at the edge of the world, and a single tree bent by the wind. The figure is tiny against all of it, and the silence feels romantic. His own line is that some people don’t need to be found, they just need a bigger place to disappear.

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