Piece of the Week: ‘Frida Blue’ by zaneta-antosik

This week’s Piece of the Week, “Frida Blue” celebrates a rarity in the canon of contemporary design: a brilliant Frida Kahlo portrait. Created by the outrageously talented Polish graphic illustrator zaneta-antosik (seriously, check out her profile). Frida Kahlo is the grandmother of Spanish-American feminist folk art, and her work has a cult-following that produces a tremendous amount of homage art in her style. So often Kahlo-inspired works of art appropriate her style in a crude, knockoff way. zaneta-antosik has done an incredible job of staying true to her integrity as an artist herself, and incorporating the look of Kahlo to make this portrait.

The detail and skill of this portrait have my design-geek-receptors pinging in overdrive. The slight texture in the background blue (and what a blue it is), combined with the curated play of geometric shapes to create concaves and convexes that build the form of Frida’s face. It’s design-engineering-art (is that a thing? it is now) at it’s best. And when it’s clear to see the mechanism of a good piece of design, as if we’re watching the cogs inside zaneta-antosik’s head turn, that is something to celebrate (and stare at, for hours on end).