The Culver City conceptual artist, has taken second prize at the 9th Chianciano Biennale for Heracles Hurls Lichas, a monumental monochrome work drawn from Greek myth.
Culver City artist Paal Anand has won Second Prize in Photography and Digital Art at the 9th Chianciano Biennale in Tuscany for Heracles Hurls Lichas, the large-scale monochrome work that opened his European exhibition season this summer.
The Biennale, held August 15 through 29 in the Tuscan spa town of Chianciano Terme, brought together 301 artists from more than 60 countries across fourteen venues, including the Museo d’Arte di Chianciano and thirteen galleries threaded through the town’s medieval center. Anand’s work was selected through the Biennale’s international open call and went on to place second.
At 112 by 162 centimeters, Heracles Hurls Lichas is closer in scale to a history painting than a conventional photograph. Printed in carbon pigment on cotton canvas, the work captures one of the darkest moments in the mythology of Heracles: poisoned by the Shirt of Nessus and driven mad by pain, the dying hero seizes Lichas, the innocent herald who delivered it, and throws him into the sea.
Anand stages the figures in the fraction of a second before they separate, suspending one body against the force of another. The image belongs to his ongoing Mythiq series, which uses living models, theatrical staging and large-format monochrome photography to revisit the physical language of classical sculpture.
“Heracles Hurls Lichas is about a moment that can’t be taken back, a man in unbearable pain turning it on the person closest to him,” Anand said. “To have that image recognized in Italy, in the country whose sculptors taught the world how to hold a body in mid-air, means a great deal to me. These myths still describe us. We are always both Heracles and Lichas: the hand that casts out, and the body suspended in flight.”
The Chianciano recognition adds another stop to an unusually international stretch for Anand. Heracles Hurls Lichas was previously shown in Shanghai at the Arte Laguna Prize 20th Anniversary Exhibition at EKA-Tianwu, Arte Laguna’s first exhibition in Asia. In 2024, Anand had been selected as an Arte Laguna Prize finalist and exhibited at the Arsenale in Venice; he now serves as the Prize’s 2026 USA Ambassador and is an inaugural inductee of its World Hall of Fame.
The trajectory is a long way from where his career began. A computer science graduate of UC Santa Barbara, Anand joined Alias|Wavefront at nineteen and worked on technology that became part of Autodesk Maya, the software platform now embedded in modern film animation and visual effects. He later spent more than two decades in Hollywood visual effects, with credits including Hellboy, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ghost Rider and The Italian Job, before turning full-time to fine art.
“I’ve been working inside the question ‘Can this be made possible?’ ever since,” Anand said. “Every series I’ve made starts with a different question.”
That technical background still runs through the work. Alongside the staged mythology of Mythiq, Anand produces Piezography Studies using multiple shades of carbon pigment, while his Priceless Habitats series employs platinum and palladium printing on vellum with gold and palladium leaf. He is a Graphis Master with fifteen Graphis Gold Photography Awards and was named Fondazione Effetto Arte’s Artist of the Year for 2025.
His practice has also moved beyond the photographic print. Earlier this year, Anand created The Ward That Never Closed, a projected holographic installation for the immersive Hospital of Emotions exhibition inside the former St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles. Developed with Veterans Stand Together, the piece confronted the psychological aftermath of military service and directed visitors toward peer support and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
“My intention was never to dramatize loss,” Anand said. “It was to give the inner lives of veterans the visible weight they have always deserved.”
Closer to home, Anand has served since 2025 as vice-chair of the Culver City Arts Foundation, the all-volunteer nonprofit that works in partnership with the City of Culver City and produces free public arts programming, including the Summer Nights Concert Series and helps with the annual Culver City Arts Festival.
And the European run that began in Tuscany is not finished. Anand’s work remains on view, from October 30, he will show Persephone and the Cheetah of Dionysus at the Barcelona Art Biennial at the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern, drawing this time on the Orphic tradition in which Persephone is the mother of the first Dionysus.
A week later, Anand is due back in Venice for the November 6 opening of the Arte Laguna Prize exhibition, where he will introduce a new Arte Laguna × Culver Arts international artist residency bringing a year of exhibitions across Europe and Asia back, in a sense, to the Culver City arts community where much of it began.