Fresh off a holographic veterans’ memorial that drew crowds to a former downtown hospital, the conceptual photographer and Culver City Arts Foundation co-chair has been chosen for a run of major European biennales this year — including the Barcelona Art Biennial at MEAM, the city’s museum of figurative art.
Paal Anand is having the kind of year most artists wait a career for. The Culver City conceptual photographer and co-chair of the Culver City Arts Foundation has been selected for a string of major European biennales in 2026 — an international run that will carry his work from a medieval hilltown in Tuscany to a figurative-art museum in Barcelona, and on to North Macedonia before the year is out.
It begins in August at the 9th Chianciano Biennale, one of Italy’s most established contemporary-art exhibitions, staged across the Chianciano Art Museum and thirteen medieval-centre galleries in the Tuscan spa town of Chianciano Terme. Selected by international jury from a worldwide open call, Anand will show Heracles Hurls Lichas, a large-format monochrome photograph from his ongoing Mythiq series. Rendered in stark black and white, it seizes on one of the most violent moments in Greek myth — the dying Heracles, poisoned by the Shirt of Nessus, hurling his herald Lichas into the sea — transcribing the frozen anguish of classical marble into living flesh.
“Where sculpture freezes the moment of flight, I wanted the photograph to make it unbearable and immediate,” Anand said. “These myths still describe us. The work asks whether we’ve truly moved past the stories that shaped us — or whether we remain, always, both Heracles and Lichas: the hand that casts out, and the body suspended mid-air.”
This autumn the spotlight shifts to Spain, where Anand takes part in the Barcelona Art Biennial at the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern (MEAM). Housed in an 18th-century palace steps from the Picasso Museum, MEAM is devoted entirely to contemporary figurative art and holds one of the world’s largest collections of representational work by living artists — a rare institutional home for precisely the tradition Anand’s photographs draw on. A third selection follows this winter: the OSTEN Biennial in Skopje, North Macedonia.
The run caps a fast-rising few years. This spring, Anand’s holographic installation The Ward That Never Closed — created with the veterans’ nonprofit Veterans Stand Together for the immersive Hospital of Emotions exhibition — transformed a room in the former St. Vincent Medical Center into a meditation on combat trauma, and drew a feature in the Los Angeles Times. He came to fine art after more than two decades in Hollywood visual effects, with credits on Hellboy and the Pirates of the Caribbean films and early work on the software that became Autodesk Maya.
A Graphis Master and Arte Laguna World Hall of Fame inductee, he serves this year as the Arte Laguna Prize’s USA Ambassador and was named Fondazione Effetto Arte’s Artist of the Year for 2025. Beyond Mythiq, his work spans the platinum-and-palladium prints of Priceless Habitats and the carbon-pigment monochromes of his Piezography Studies.
The Chianciano Biennale opens August 15 in Chianciano Terme, Italy; the Barcelona and Skopje showings follow this autumn. More of Anand’s work is at paalanand.com.
