At just twenty-eight, Alexander (Oleksandr) Kryzhanovskyi has already established himself as one of the most intriguing voices in Ukraine’s contemporary art scene. 

Based in Kyiv, the multidisciplinary artist works across painting, graphics, and sculpture, weaving together fragments of memory, dream, and personal mythology. His paintings, filled with vivid colors, fractured figures, and abstract architectures, feel like scenes glimpsed in a half-remembered dream, at once personal and universal.

She creates photo diaries: wherever she travels, she collects images that become a personal archive of memories. Nina Ivanović, an artist, sculptor, and photographer, travels a lot: through exhibitions, residencies, or with her U10 collective. These photographs form the foundation of her work, a visual memory bank she revisits whenever preparing new projects or exhibitions.

For Nina, walking, roaming, and exploring is an essential part of her creative process. Moving through spaces shifts her perspective and allows her to observe and learn, shaping the way she works.

Elena Alonso bridges technical drawing, architecture, design, and unique craftsmanship. Her work, spanning paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations, is all about precision while maintaining an organic, tactile quality. 

Through her meticulous and intuitive approach, Elena creates forms that balance structural rigor with sensuality, exploring the intersections between familiarity and strangeness, function and ornament, body and space.

Three decades back, Wallace Chan, plagued by a brutal headache in Tibet, heard inside his painfully suffering head an internal melody, an experience that resurfaced when curator James Putnam introduced him to Brian Eno's music. This auditory memory served as the genesis for "Transcendence," Chan's latest exhibit in Venice.

Today, in the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà (Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà), Chan's gigantesque titanium sculptures, dangling from above, bearing expressions akin to Munch's anguish, coexist with Eno's haunting tunes. 

The World of Fungi is a ceramic collection that brings to life the hidden beauty and mystery of one of nature’s most powerful forces: mushrooms.

The artist behind the work, Natalia Abramishvili, has long been fascinated by fungi: an organism that is everywhere, silently shaping our world. They create soil, heal, regenerate, and at the same time, embody decay. They live in a paradox: both life-giving and life-taking, a reminder of the endless cycle of nature. 

Tinus Vermeersch, a Belgian artist who moves fluidly between the surreal and the everyday, offers an invitation to embrace the unknown. 

It is a journey inward: an excavation of the subconscious, where shifting forms and disquieting landscapes conjure a world in flux. His "tegumen" motifs, organic and hair-like, have become a signature, symbolizing protection, transformation, and the passage of time. The word tegumen in Latin means "protection" or "cover," further deepening the layers of meaning in these recurring forms, pulsing with change, fragility, and a meditative impermanence.

Born in Paris in 1994, Margaux Compte-Mergier is a sculptor, performer, and author whose hauntingly hybrid creatures blur the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, the digital and the mythological. Based between Berlin and Paris, and with a background in the theory and practice of lanuage and the arts (EHESS, Paris), she is currently represented by RÍO & MEÑAKA gallery, and has exhibited widely across Europe and Mexico, with recent solo shows at Tignous Contemporary Art Center in Montreuil and Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin.

Margaux's practice is marked by a fascination with transformation, digital glitches, and the aesthetics of chance. She creates what she calls "monsters that hold together our contradictions”—tender and voracious beings made of resin, metal powders, and everyday detritus. As she herself pointed out during our conversation at her recent exhibition at ARCO Lisboa, "they are a bit creepy but also kinda cute". 

There are moments when the world pauses. When touch, memory, and spirit align in a single, quiet gesture. 

Nina Khemchyan, an artist whose hands have spent decades shaping the very clay of the earth, invites us into such a moment. Her latest work, UN JOUR AU PARADIS—“A Day in Paradise”—is a journey into the intimate: the earth beneath us, the material that holds our memories, and the sacredness of the process of creation itself.

Humorously horrific, colorfully grim, melancholically blatant, phantasmagoric and grotesque, to the point of looking nearly hallucinatory. The surreal paintings of Vukadin Filipović, a young Serbian artist, currently living and working in Vienna, are attractive and disturbing at the same time.

I stopped next to his works at Vienna Contemporary, and instantly dreamt away, wondering in the back of my mind: who are they, these creatures and those people? This cute doggie with terrifyingly empty blue eyes. This fluffy, soft beast with ridiculously long, bloody fangs. These young, exaggeratedly laid-back bohemian men; this elegant, sad woman with empty, red eye sockets. Where are they, and where am I?

So I decided to ask the artist himself.

Stephanie Lucchese. The Marble Faun. (Image courtesy: Stephanie Lucchese) Life starts with a woman. The Marble Faun by Stephanie Lucchese is a striking vision of transformation,...