2025-09-13 00:00:00
Through the lens of Tim Flach, exotic bird species, farm animals, and our canine companions brim with personality. Through books like Dogs, Endangered, and Birds, he highlights familiar animals alongside wildlife we don’t often get the chance to meet face-to-face (thankfully, in some cases). Flach’s vibrant bird portraits and projects centered around the human relationship with animals give us the chance to admire feathered and furry creatures up-close in striking compositions.
Forthcoming from Abrams later next month, Flach’s new book, Feline, celebrates our unending love for cats of all varieties. From domestic shorthairs to sleek purebreds to regal big cats, these beloved animals are captured in vibrant detail to illustrate their expansive range of textures, colors, sizes, and behaviors—and don’t forget the toe beans.
Feline contains more than 170 photographs, including information about different breeds, their evolution, and why they’ve captured our hearts and imaginations for millennia. “Flach explores this deep, sometimes one-sided but always enduring bond, revealing the many identities of cats—from their sacred status in ancient cultures to their viral superstardom in the digital age,” the publisher says.
Slated for release on October 21, you can pre-order Feline on Bookshop. See more of Flach’s work on his website, and follow updates on Instagram.
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2025-09-12 21:00:00
In the paintings of Joseph Renda Jr., trompe-l’œil windows, arches, and blue skies meet in surreal settings. His René Magritte-esque canvases celebrate nature and the uncanny, sometimes infused with a tinge of humor, to encourage an appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things. Instead of focusing on the subconscious, like the 20th-century Surrealists, Renda emphasizes elements of our surroundings—birds, gardens, flowers, and expansive landscapes—which nevertheless possess rich symbolism.
Birds, for example, have traditionally represented freedom, optimism, and connections to spiritual worlds. Plants, storms, tools, and myriad other motifs carry their own inherent meanings, from notions of growth and transformation to balance and justice. Situated within windows and archways, we’re invited to peer into—but not quite enter—an esoteric world. And the blue sky sometimes cracks to reveal what may, in fact, be a façade with who-knows-what beyond what we can see.
Renda’s recent stone arch pieces are included in a three-person show at Vertical Gallery, The Scenic Route, alongside Jerome Tiunayan and Laura Catherwood. The exhibition runs through September 27 in Chicago. Find more on Renda’s website and Instagram.
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2025-09-12 01:07:00
Our human impulse to categorize and collect is a central theme of a robust body of work by Claire Rosen. For more than a decade, Rosen has sought out chattering macaws, cockatoos with fluffy, blush-colored plumage, and ornery owls, which she pairs with patterned papers and textiles.
An African penguin, for example, stares curiously at its pink-and-white striped surroundings, while a Lady Amherst’s pheasant trots across ornate brocade. The resulting portraits are meditations on notions of beauty and the relationship between nature and culture, particularly as we’ve reproduced imagery of the former throughout centuries of art and design.
Rosen is attuned with this enduring tradition, sharing in a statement about the collection:
The walls of the imperial villas of Ancient Rome were adorned with frescoes detailing rich flora and fauna. During the Renaissance, Rafael reinvented this ancient style through his grotesques, which depict birds, fruits, and plant life. Carefully crafted representations of the natural world were re- imagined yet again in 19th-century Britain when William Morris began producing richly ornamented wallpaper featuring wild birds and vegetation.
Selecting a backdrop for a particular creature prompts a range of considerations, and Rosen tries to “induce beauty, optical illusion and visual blending, (so) the birds appear to belong when in reality it is a far cry from their natural environment.” The striking portraits reflect our ongoing fascination with possessing what captivates us.
Workshop Arts will publish a collection of Rosen’s portraits and essays, in addition to texts by scholars, in a book this fall. Find more from the series on her website and Instagram.
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2025-09-11 22:10:00
From bubble-like bulges amid the arches of London’s iconic Old Billingsgate to a 15-meter-tall red droplet frozen in the center of a disused swimming pool in Aberdeen, Steve Messam explores scale, form, and our experiences of the built environment in large-scale installations.
Messam is known for his large-scale inflatable works that reinterpret architecture and explore human influence over the landscape. Often, he fills apertures like arcades or underpasses with forms that balloon and billow, drawing attention to structural forms while considering their fundamental function as places to enter or move through.
In “Accommodation:Occupation,” Messam delves into the history of 19th-century infrastructure in the U.K. through an exploration of what are known as accommodation and occupation bridges—railroad crossings designed for rural areas that provided a tunnel beneath, so that farmers could still access their land on the other side of the tracks. Some of these historic bridges still exist, often on private land, such as two in County Durham along the former route of the Stockton & Darlington Railway.
For “Below,” which Messam situated under a bridge in Tianfu Art Park in Chengdu, China, the site’s use as a thoroughfare is retained by creating two symmetric forms with a gap between them, which people can walk through while immersing themselves in the installation.
Whether popcorn-like, spiked, bubbling, or cascading, Messam’s playful interventions prompt us to view our surroundings with renewed attention. Explore even more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
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2025-09-11 01:49:37
Thanks to increasingly advanced imaging technologies, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), in collaboration with SUNY Geneseo, have an unprecedented ability to glimpse rare and previously unknown marine species.
In 2019, an encounter with an unfamiliar pink snailfish, which swam just above the sea floor, led to the documented discovery of a species not yet known to science: the bumpy snailfish. Detected in the deep ocean off the coast of California, this small, light pink-colored vertebrate is characteristic of a snailfish with a large head, jelly-like body, and a narrow, thin tail.
“Many snailfish species have a disk on their belly that allows them to grip the seafloor or hitchhike on larger animals, such as deep-sea crabs,” says MBARI communications specialist Raúl Nava. “Shallow-water snailfishes often cling to rocks and seaweed, curling up like a snail.”
MBARI researchers used a combination of microscopy, micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), and measuring techniques to collect detailed information about the snailfish. They also employed DNA sequencing methods to distinguish each of the three newly found fish from all other known species, confirming they’re totally unique. This also allowed scientists to determine their evolutionary position in the broader Liparidae family, to which snailfish belong.
Dark, bumpy, and sleek snailfish were all named by scientists in this new report. The bumpy snailfish is slightly pink and, like its name suggests, has an overall texture with loose skin that’s a little bumpy. The dark snailfish is fully black in color, and the sleek variety has a uniquely long body and doesn’t possess a suction disk. Sleek indeed.
Take a deep dive into MBARI’s recent findings, plus numerous other underwater discoveries, on the program’s website.
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2025-09-11 00:00:00
Cradling tiny homes, seated amid flowers, or asleep and dreaming in a garden, the figures in Sergiu Ciochinǎ’s paintings rest and interact in moments of poignant solitude and reverie. The artist’s Blue Series is a visual collection of his own memories, reflections, and moods, which he elaborates into atmospheric and sometimes fantastical canvases.
“For me, blue is the color of gentle melancholy, profound calm, and also a hidden hope,” Ciochinǎ says. Titles like “Don’t Eclipse Me” and “You Are Your Own Home” tap into our deep-seated desire for connection and a sense of belonging. They also hint at the nature of individuality within the context of our relationships with others, navigated in a series of dreamy scenes.
Ciochinǎ also creates glowing landscapes that capture building facades at sunrise or sun-dappled streets of historic European towns. Time and light play a significant role in his portrayals of anonymous figures, too, illuminating their skin with glowing details or situating them in the shadow of floral arrangements or verdant, dusky gardens.
The figures’ positions and blue tone nod slightly to Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period around 1901 to 1904, when the artist’s earlier, more realistic depictions of people and domestic spaces were largely rendered in blue and blue-green tones to underscore themes of despair and turmoil. For Ciochinǎ, dreams and emotions center in his mystical compositions.
“I wanted each canvas to convey a kind of breath, a calm vibration, almost musical,” the artist says. “Blue, for me, becomes a meeting space between reality and dream, between memory and the present—a bridge that invites the viewer to pause and contemplate.”
Ciochinǎ is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in Paris next year, which will include work expanding on the Blue Series. See more on his website, and follow updates on Instagram.
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