AGE: 27
BASED IN: New York
Asher Liftin got his big break at the tender age of 12, when he was chosen from a towering pile of submissions to create original artwork for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Two college degrees in cognitive science and visual art later, he creates trompe l’oeil compositions that look as if they are tapestries but are in fact finely rendered, pointillist compositions inspired by art-historical still lifes and history paintings.
Describe your work in three words.
Constructing a picture.
Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.
When I was 12 years old I met an older artist named Christian Aldunate, who was teaching students how to use spray paint to write graffiti on large paper sheets on the street in Brooklyn. He brought me along with him to openings of other graffiti artists. It was a community where art wasn’t hoarded but dispersed. In graffiti, a word becomes an abstraction that solves the problem of subject matter. The creative problems lie in form and color. I use images today in a similar way: starting with an image, decoupling it from its meaning or associations, and finding ways to translate it into a painting.
Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?
A book that is all 25,669 photos I’ve taken that are currently in my references folder on my iPhone.
What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?
Paul Sietsema’s enamel phone paintings. He covers the actual phone and surface in a monochrome enamel paint, photographs it, and then repaints the painting with the same enamel paint. The final painting is an optically seductive collapse of subject and object.
What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?
Muji pens.
What art-world trend would you like to see die out?
Art-world trends.
Is there a studio rule you live by?
I won’t eat too much when working out an idea. Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast that he could see paintings much more strongly on an empty stomach, and this helped him understand Cézanne’s landscapes. That always stuck with me. I thought it made sense that if your body is hungry, your mind would be more open.
See CULTURED’s full 2025 Young Artists list and access other individual artist profiles here.
in your life?
