Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde May 2026

Long before the mainstream media picked up on her, Cubbi was hand-stapling a zine called Mold. The publication featured photos of decaying fruit, interviews with local sewer workers, and poetry written on napkins. Mold gained a cult following because it was deliberately ugly and uncomfortable in an age of Instagram perfection.

Cubbi’s breakout body of work arrived with the “Pixel‑Cubist” series, first exhibited at the Raven Gallery, Bristol in 2014. The series comprised 36 canvases, each a hybrid of low‑resolution digital imagery and the fragmented planes of Cubism. Using a technique he called “algorithmic deconstruction,” Cubbi fed photographs of everyday objects—phones, coffee cups, street signs—into a custom script that broke them down into 8×8 pixel grids. He then hand‑painted each pixel with acrylics, re‑introducing texture and brushstroke. cubbi thompson van wylde

Critics lauded the series for its commentary on the digital mediation of reality: Long before the mainstream media picked up on

“Cubbi turns the flatness of a screen into a tactile, almost archaeological site,” wrote Sarah Kline for Frieze (May 2015). “He forces us to confront the fact that our visual consumption is both hyper‑accelerated and deeply fragmented.” “Cubbi turns the flatness of a screen into

The series traveled to MoMA PS1 (New York, 2016) and Kunsthalle Zurich (2017), cementing Cubbi’s reputation as a bridge between the art‑historical past and the technological present.

The nickname “Cubbi” was a family inside joke. As a toddler, he would attempt to assemble wooden blocks into perfect cubes, often failing spectacularly. His mother would tease, “You’ll be a cubist one day,” a remark that stuck. The moniker later became his artistic signature, a playful nod to the early 20th‑century movement that would influence him profoundly.