Another month of NFT action has come and gone, and that means another riveting round up of art NFTs is here! Below I’ve curated a list of my top five new and exciting NFT artworks, including why I love them and where to find them.

‘Woman, Life, Freedom زن، زندگى، آزادى’ by Delaram Pourabdi

Available on SuperRare

Pourabdi is an Iranian American artist living and working in Los Angeles, and naturally the recent events in Iran surrounding the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini have affected her deeply, as they have millions of others around the world. Pourabdi’s digital artwork, rooted in photography, is a tangent from her usual practice that translates ideas into visual language, often through dance and movement. The body is still central to this work though, as it is to the protests that have taken place in Iran and other countries since the death of 22 year old Amini on 16 September 2022. The photograph highlights the vulnerability and fragility of the female body in the face of violent state, political and social oppression, showing the bare skin and veins beneath the skin of the hands to emphasize this. The photograph is accompanied by an inscription:

They are afraid a woman can

be this free. This soft.

This strong. This brave.

Pourabdi highlights, with her words and imagery, the contrast between feminine softness and strength, which exist simultaneously in both her image and within every woman and female-identifying person on earth.

‘I Love You In The Rain’ by Degen Poet

Available on Exchange.Art

The work of Degen Poet is wide ranging and diverse, incorporating their own poetry with imagery from art history, Pokémon, blue chip NFT projects, and illustration. In this piece, a digital composite created using multiple physical scans, the artist explores language as a raw material for art, deconstructing the words into symbols, with random letters scattered across the bottom of the ‘page.’ There is an intense sentimentality to the poem above, with its hints at intimacy and love at first sight in the rain, the stuff of classic romantic films and books. But the appearance of the words themselves, which have been struck out and re-written, suggest the incompetence of words to really capture the most basic and visceral emotions – love, grief, ecstasy. As Karen Joy Fowler puts it, “language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.” As a writer, this concept is endlessly fascinating to me, like a challenge to be overcome, and the way that Degen Poet has captured this notion in their piece is elegant and subtle, revealing language’s complexity, structure and inadequacy in just six simple lines.

The owner of this NFT will be able to purchase a physical print via The Ormuz.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/102328_b151477050b34673b6b370b1d6bdf13f/720p/mp4/file.mp4

‘Infinity’ by Celia Fernandez

Available on Culture Vault

Fernandez was named a finalist in the 2020 Sunshine Coast Art Prize for her painting ‘Chimera’, which she has now re-imagined in digital form for Culture Vault’s premium NFT platform. In ‘Infinity,’ she takes her original painting through a journey of transformations and perspectives until she reveals a whole new language, and the piece is transformed into a new version of itself. Her approach to the method of painting for ‘Chimera’ was spontaneous and unplanned, a departure from her usual process of creating a plan or sketch at the outset, and allowed her to discover a new approach to perceive and treat colours and shapes. The placement of different tones and shapes next to each other, now set in movement in the mp4, create new relationships and optical effects previously unimagined by the artist. Clearly, Fernandez’s work is influenced by the Op Art movement of the 1960’s, which is brought into the present moment through NFT technology and digital animation.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/102328_ad4e451d37cd4c4183256a2ecde991bd/480p/mp4/file.mp4

‘Egg of Now’ by Mocoverse x Pilar Zeta

Available on Nifty Gateway

Moco Museum’s NFT platform, Mocoverse, has teamed up with Argentinean artist and creative director Pilar Zeta to create an NFT that combines history, symbolism and modernity in the artist’s idiosyncratic style. Zeta’s art is heavily influenced by her upbringing with an art history teacher as a mother, and a nascent interest in Ancient Egypt, cosmology and metaphysics. Zeta’s artistic style is defined by her minimalist, surrealist landscapes, her bold use of colour and of deconstructed shapes. She has described her artistic style as ‘mystical futurism’. All of these elements are present in ‘Egg of Now’, which marries minimalist, geometric architecture and sculpture with the symbolism of the egg symbol, which across cultures and throughout history has intoned creation and the circle of life. The resulting composition is both entirely of this moment and emblematic of a larger trajectory, reaching back through the ages to imbue the simple materials and forms with cosmic meaning.

‘Through the Phone’ by Bobbi Cai

Available on SuperRare

I’m bringing this month’s list to a close with another sentimental, self-indulgent piece, this time by Bobbi Cai, a 24 year old artist working across digital art, photography and NFTs. Cai created this work as a love letter to all their crushes, and the emotions that are recorded in perpetuity on their phone. It’s a 21st century declaration of love – a technologically advanced, sweet and crushing, head-rushing, out of body experience. There’s clearly pain involved in Cai’s crushes (aren’t there always?), with dismembered hands, heads and legs filling the lower half of the piece. The highly detailed, decorative surface perfectly encapsulates the chaos of love, the endless spinning thoughts that occupy the mind; the dichotomy of highs and lows, pleasure and pain, that come along with that oldest and most sacred of feelings – a crush. It’s at once scary and thrilling, and just like a real crush, this piece leaves you wanting more.

That’s all for September’s top NFTs! Stay tuned for next month’s new + noteworthy, and keep up to date with me via Instagram and Twitter