• Cizza Bernal: A Mexico City Artist Worth Watching in 2026

    Cizza Bernal: A Mexico City Artist Worth Watching in 2026

    Who is Cizza Bernal? Bernal started out painting oil replicas of Impressionist works before picking up a camera. As he put it, the years of painting had already taught him composition, so photography came naturally. But photography alone wasn’t enough. “It was as if magically I already knew how to take photos thanks to painting,

  • The Urban Chronicler

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    The Urban Chronicler

    Sebas Velasco was born in 1988 in Burgos, a city in northern Spain. He has drawn since he was a small child, but his artistic journey truly began in 2004 when he started painting graffiti on the walls of his hometown at fifteen or sixteen years old, fascinated by the album covers of metal bands

  • The Metaphor Builder

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    The Metaphor Builder

    Bára Prášilová was born in 1979 in Cheb, Czech Republic, at a time when communism still shaped every horizon. At thirteen, like every Czech child of that era, she was asked to decide her profession for life, and though she wanted to be a fashion designer, her parents steered her toward something more practical, paying

  • 99% Club: Raphael

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    99% Club: Raphael

    Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino was born on April 6, 1483, in Urbino, a small but unusually cultured city-state in central Italy. His father, Giovanni Santi, was court painter to the ruling Montefeltro family: a competent artist but more importantly an educated man of letters who was acutely aware of the most advanced painters of his

  • The Algorithmic Classicist

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    The Algorithmic Classicist

    Davide Quayola was born in Rome in 1982. His mother, a passionate painter, fostered his interest in the arts from an early age and enrolled him at a traditional fine art high school in Rome. There, he learned visual analysis of paintings, describing classical works not through narratives but through light, color, and composition. Teachers

  • 99% Club: John Singer Sargent

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    99% Club: John Singer Sargent

    John Singer Sargent was born January 12, 1856, in Florence, Italy, to American expatriate parents. His father, Dr. FitzWilliam Sargent, had been an eye surgeon in Philadelphia. His mother, Mary Newbold Singer, was an amateur artist. After their first child died at age two, the couple left America heartbroken and became nomadic, traveling between Italy,

  • The Species Archivist

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    The Species Archivist

    Joel Sartore was born June 16, 1962, in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and grew up in Ralston, Nebraska. As a kid, he looked through his mother’s Time-Life picture books. One image stayed with him: Martha, the last passenger pigeon, photographed before she died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. A species that once numbered in the

  • The Borderless Collective

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    The Borderless Collective

    TeamLab was founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko and four friends from the University of Tokyo. Inoko was born in 1977 in Tokushima, Japan, and studied Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics. The founding members included Shunsuke Aoki, Sakai Daisuke, Tamura Tetsuya, and Yoshimura Joe, all with engineering backgrounds. They officially incorporated when Inoko graduated in

  • The Meme Classicist

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    The Meme Classicist

    Ksenia Buridanova enrolled at art school in Rostov-on-Don in 2001. She spent years copying works by classical masters from nature, training her hand and eye in the techniques of Vermeer, Bosch, and the Dutch Golden Age. In 2014, she graduated with honors from the Art College of M.B. Grekov, then continued her education at the

  • The Time Archaeologist

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    The Time Archaeologist

    Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. An elementary school teacher showed him how to make photograms using photosensitive paper and light. In high school, he photographed Audrey Hepburn’s face flickering on a movie screen, trying to capture light that was already disappearing. He studied politics and sociology at Rikkyo University, traveled through communist