The pristine white, ceramic foot pendant of a Ukrainian artist Liza Portnova is incredibly beautiful. Yet you instantly feel the pain: as if those sharp needles were piercing your foot, not a miniature porcelain piece of art.

Today we speak with Liza about her jewelry, her sculptures, about her ideas about art and the world today.

Her paintings gather weight slowly, like a body holding tension without knowing when it started. Paint thickens, figures hunch or coil, surfaces soften and resist, looking feels intimate and slightly off-balance.

Working between Guadalajara and Chicago, Julieta Beltrán Lazo moves through geographies the way her figures move through space: alert, transitional, never fully settled. Her practice is rooted in painting, yet it continually presses against its own limits, reaching into fibers, writing, and performance when the questions she is asking outgrow the frame of the canvas. Materials are not chosen for effect – they come through necessity, through the feeling that an idea needs to be touched, knotted, weighed, or worn.

Painting has always negotiated distance: between eye and surface, intention and accident, image and the world that presses in around it. 

In Daniel Karrer’s work, that distance is literalized, polished, and made visible. A thin, barely three-millimetre, sheet of glass intervenes: it separates the spectator from the image, slows down the perception, and discreetly insists that looking is never immediate. 

In Anna Fasshauer’s Berlin studio, aluminum is struck, dented, and riveted by hand. Working without assistants or industrial bending machines, the artist shapes each sculpture through direct physical force: the dents remain visible, and the damage becomes the form.

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.