Karlotta Freier is a talented illustrator whose works you might have seen in magazines and publications like Greenpeace Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. She is known for her unique approach to illustrations that combines cartoon-like style with dreamlike scenarios.
Freier creates vivid and colorful artwork that offers the viewer a lot to unpack. Subtle details and discrepancies between what is expected and what is presented lead to surreal scenes that fill out the canvas. The flowers are bigger than humans, flying carpets carry white horses, and large fishes use cities as their aquariums.
When working on new pieces, Freier isn’t necessarily striving for technical perfection. Instead, she relies on the combination of colors and lines to create an atmosphere that will feed emotions to the viewer.
“The emotional world is narrative enough for me, so I often just concentrate on that. Hope, sadness, longing, anger, solitude, fear, surprise, annoyance… it’s fun to inhabit drawings with figures who just feel stuff,” she explained in a recent interview with It’s Nice That.
Freier has an MFA Illustration degree and has worked as an illustration professor at the China Academy of Art. Her works have been exhibited around the world and featured on posters, book covers, newspaper front pages, and more. She is currently also working on her first comic book.
