Following the success of Andrés Reisinger's recent NFT-based auction of virtual furniture, which raised a total of $450,000 for ten works, and Alexis Christodoulou’s subsequent $340,000 sale of nine animated environments, it’s clear that the market for digital design concepts is booming. Here we outline our pick of five other artists to keep an eye on.
Zyva Studio
The product of French architect Anthony Authié, Zyva Studio’s virtual works often explore themes of luxury and comfort inserted into hostile and uncompromising environments. Arctic Monkeys Artefacts 4020 (pictured), his partnership with Dutch-German design studio Supertoys Supertoys, sets an amorphous and inviting furniture line in desolate, seemingly uninhabited world two centuries into the future. ‘The furniture pieces can be seen as diagnostic artefacts indicative of a cultural group with a radical philosophy formed in the age of postmodern-animism, an era just after the COVID-19 crisis where objects became subjects,’ explained the artists in a recent interview with Designboom.
Studio Brasch
Sweden’s Studio Brasch – AKA Anders Brasch-Willumsen – has spent the last decade building a portfolio of hyper-expressive work for brands such as Apple, Carlsberg, InterContinental Hotels and Byredo over the course of the last decade. ‘To me, the most important quality of a great image is that it makes you feel something,’ Brasch-Willumsen explained in an interview with It’s Nice That. ‘It can be a concrete or an abstract feeling, maybe something you can’t describe – like a dream. It’s my responsibility to channel that emotion, and to do so I need to fully understand where my client is coming from and where he wants to go.’
Spot Studio
Hailing from Barcelona, Nicolás Cañellas’s Spot Studio is another that has created a reputation with work for brands – YOO and Emeco among them – as well as editorial illustrations and multiple visualization projects for product design studios. Of his staging for the online exhibition Imagined, for uncertain times (pictured) Cañellas explains that he was interested in ‘mixing real textures with impossible architectural compositions and Lo-Fi atmosphere’, an approach that can be read across much of his work.
Six N. Five
Perhaps the studio whose work you’re most likely to have seen in the wild, the Spanish practice Six N. Five has created still and moving image work for clients such as Nike, Samsung, Givenchy and Rimowa, to name just a few. Speaking to Gestalten, director Ezequiel Pini said of their work: ‘It isn't easy for me to describe our own style, but I can use some words to talk about it: subtle, soft, conceptual, graphical, mostly pastel, and sometimes provocative.’
Another Artist
Based in New York, Another Artist sits squarely in the world of architecture and design visualization, but the team exhibits an aesthetic vocabulary and ambition that has also brought them to the attention of music video directors and brand marketers. Founder John Luke Hodgkins cites inspirations such as Pollock, Kandinsky and Bacon, telling the publication Design Wanted that he’s interested in figuring out how ‘to bend the rules to create surreal animations which make people question what physical reality is’.
