Layla Vladi

Layla Vladi is a German-born visual artist currently based in San Francisco. Her work has been featured in Artifact NYC, LA Art Show, and Frieze Seoul.

Growing up between Hamburg and Timmendorfer

Strand. Throughout her formative years, Vladi excelled in art school and participated in several art exhibits. Her family moved from place to place often when she was young, which did not allow for lasting friendships and as a result her childhood was a largely solitary one. Vladi would later credit the instability in her early life with the birth of her artistic identity, finally settling in California to pursue a career in art.

Vladi's brand of "visual poetry" reaches into every corner of the human imagination, blurring the lines between the past and future, the mundane and mystical, the real and surreal. Drawing inspiration from sources as vast and varied as anime and video games, Romantic poetry and Japanese folklore, she turns the digital canvas into a place of alchemy where magical possibilities come alive.

Her work features imagined worlds full of dreamy landscapes and haunted figures, where glassy orlos hover in the sky instead of moons. Where flowers and butterflies proliferate as much as skulls and fire. Where hard-edged shapes meet feather-soft brush strokes.

These captured moments often hold tension and quietude in equal measure, a testament to the endless spectrum of the human experience and our ability to feel two polar opposite emotions at once.

Each work is an invitation to leave behind the everyday and give yourself over to the fantastic.