Author: Iris

Sigrid Thaler is an Italian artist based in Milan whose work develops through lived experience, movement, and environment. Born in Italy and raised in a small mountain town, she grew up surrounded by elevation, stillness, and slowly shifting light. These early conditions shaped her sensitivity to space and atmosphere, as well as her attentiveness to the quiet relationships that exist within the natural world. Over time, her life and practice expanded far beyond that setting. Periods spent working and living in Austria, Paris, Singapore, and São Paulo introduced her to a wide spectrum of cultural contexts, from Northern European restraint…

Born in Cuba in 1983, Reynier Leyva Novo treats art as a way of thinking through the world rather than illustrating it. His practice investigates how power, memory, and belief settle into daily life and how those forces are reinforced or undone over time. Working fluidly across sculpture, installation, sound, painting, and research-based methods, Novo examines the mechanics of history—how it is shaped, obscured, and quietly carried forward. He often turns toward symbols linked to authority and ideology, not to reaffirm them, but to test what remains once their certainty dissolves. Novo avoids linear storytelling. Instead, he assembles meaning through…

Bjarke Ingels 4 Bjarke Ingels is one of the most widely recognized architects today. Founder of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), he champions a design philosophy called “hedonistic sustainability.” Instead of thinking of green architecture as a sacrifice, Ingels frames it as a chance to make things more enjoyable and useful. His work includes buildings like VM Houses in Denmark, innovative mixed-use complexes, and bold infrastructure projects like Amager Bakke—a waste-to-energy plant with a public ski slope on its roof. Ingels’ influence comes from blending environmental performance with playful public engagement, making sustainability exciting for clients and cities alike. Francis Kéré 4 Francis Kéré brings…

1) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1959) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum broke museum conventions. Instead of separate floors, visitors walk a continuous spiral ramp. Wright wanted people to experience art in a smooth, uninterrupted flow. The building itself became an icon of modern design. 3) Robie House (Chicago, 1910) Robie House is a key Prairie Style home. Long horizontal lines, deep roof overhangs, and bands of windows create a strong link to the flat Midwest landscape. Many features of modern homes — open plans and integrated spaces — trace back to houses like this. 4) Taliesin West (Arizona, 1937) Taliesin West served…

Alexandra Jicol’s practice grows out of a dialogue between inner experience and the outside world, between what is remembered and what is happening now. She spent her early life in Bucharest in a period marked by social constraint and pressure. Her surroundings offered sharp contrasts: the quiet freedom of natural landscapes alongside the structure and watchfulness of city life. Those differences left a quiet imprint. They appear in paintings where calm and tension live side by side. Open, breathable areas meet compact, denser forms. Soft hues exist next to subtle disquiet. For Jicol, art begins with attention. She treats painting…

Julian Jollon is an American artist whose creative path has moved through detours, pauses, and returns. His background includes formal study in Fine Arts, Photography, and Painting, and early on he imagined a life centered on the studio. That plan shifted. For fifteen years he stepped away from art and worked in Hospital Epidemiology, a field grounded in science, systems, and the care of human life. During that period, he also experienced a liver transplant, an event that changed how he understands time and survival. When Jollon came back to art, he did so with steadiness and purpose. His practice…

Vicky Tsalamata works out of Athens, Greece, with a practice that keeps one foot in history and the other in the present day. Her prints echo the scope of Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine—not as homage, but as a framework for looking at what people do to each other, what systems reward, and what gets lost along the way. There’s humor in her approach, but it isn’t comforting. It’s sharp, sometimes sarcastic, and aimed at the gaps between what we say we value and how we actually live. Her imagery pulls from moral storytelling traditions—Balzac’s social panorama, Dante’s vision of…

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1953, Vandorn Hinnant has spent decades shaping a practice where craft and inquiry move side by side. For him, art is never only about technique—it’s a way to test ideas about identity, values, and the forces that shape a life. He earned a B.A. in Art Design from North Carolina A&T State University, then strengthened his understanding of volume and scale through sculpture studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. That dual foundation—design training with sculptural rigor—runs through everything he builds. His forms feel deliberate and resolved, yet they stay open to…

Sonja Kalb arrives at painting from a place most artists don’t start: engineering. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, she trained in textile and design engineering—work that depends on accuracy, systems thinking, and an intimate understanding of how materials behave. That early education doesn’t show up in her paintings as rigidity. It shows up as steadiness. She knows how to build a surface, how to hold a composition together, how to use restraint without draining the work of feeling. What keeps her practice alive is the way she treats that discipline as a launchpad, not a limit. Her abstractions live in the…

Haeley Kyong doesn’t make art that asks to be decoded. She makes art that asks to be noticed. A lot of contemporary work is built to be explained—its first move is intellectual. Kyong’s work takes a different route. It arrives through sensation first, then thought follows. You feel something shift—your breathing, your focus, your mood—before you can name what caused it. Her practice rests on a steady belief that art can reach us ahead of language, before we start labeling, organizing, and deciding what we’re supposed to think. Kyong was raised in South Korea and later spent key years in…