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Fragmented Mural Combines Optical Illusions with Street Art Style

Italian studio Truly Design recently completed a project that combines the magic of optical illusion with a street art style. The four creatives that make up the practice originally bonded over graffiti during their teenage years. They used this passion and skill to create Vanitas, a large artwork that's spread among many sand-colored rectangular forms.

Truly Design painted subjects that have to do with science and technology: a human skull, a butterfly, and a spaceship are just a few. It's all fractured on different sections of the outdoor boxes, and depending on your vantage point, things either look disjointed or like one cohesive piece. Sometimes, everything seems to exist on a single plane, but we know that it's just the studio cleverly fooling our eyes.

Vanitas was created for the public exhibition Art on Science and hosted by the Polytechnic Federal School of Lausanne. The title of the impressive optical illusion actually refers to the word vanitas, which is a theme that was widely portrayed in the 16th and 17th century arts. Works often featured symbols that signify worldly ambitions and scientific accomplishments, not unlike what we see here.

Truly Design website and Behance page
via [Illusion]

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled 'Embroidered Life' that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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