Wes Anderson’s newest film, The Phoenician Scheme, hits theaters on May 30th in the U.S. The plot centers on a wealthy businessman, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), who reconnects with his convent-bound daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), and makes her his heir. The movie promises many of the pleasures we’ve come to expect from the beloved American filmmaker: The characters are quirky, the families charmingly dysfunctional, the delivery deadpan. And the imagery is peak Wes Anderson: full of patterns, symmetry, and high contrast. In some of the shots that best exemplify his signature style, blue skies play against an orange desert landscape (Asteroid City, 2023), a deep red elevator offsets purple hotel uniforms (The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014), and three men in gray suits sit on brilliantly patterned yellow upholstery (The Darjeeling Limited, 2007).

This immediately recognizable aesthetic is Anderson’s calling card. Its earliest iteration appeared in his first film, Bottle Rocket (1996), and became fully formed by the time The Royal Tenenbaums hit theaters in 2001. In the following years, Anderson has set his tales on a submarine (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, 2004), at a summer camp (Moonrise Kingdom, 2012), across Europe (The Grand Budapest Hotel; The French Dispatch, 2021), in the desert (Asteroid City), and beyond. Wherever Anderson takes his audience, the tight visual experience makes each setting feel like part of a cohesive, highly curated, and quite magical world.

For lovers of the Anderson aesthetic, here are eight artists who have developed unique visual languages similarly invested in patterns, adornment, and offbeat color schemes.

Nicolas Party

B. 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland. Lives and works in New York.

Known for: fantastical multimedia installations in brilliant hues

Sunset, 2018
Nicolas Party

X Museum

Untitled, Red Portrait, 2017
Nicolas Party

Baldwin

Nicolas Party, like Anderson, adores saturated palettes and fantastical settings. His ambitious worldbuilding practice extends across paintings, murals, installations, and sculptures set in a bright, bulbous universe. This alternate reality is populated by electric blue and red busts and portraits, purple and yellow pears, and craggy, red landscapes. Surrealism and 19th-century Swiss landscape painting inform this work, which vibrates with its own contemporary energy.

Party’s interest in accessibility and all-encompassing art experiences dates back to his early days creating graffiti, running his own gallery, and making sets for concerts. The artist’s many talents coalesce in his sumptuous and multi-faceted exhibitions, which allow viewers a reprieve from the real world.

Matthew Ronay

B. 1976, Louisville, Kentucky. Lives and works in New York.

Known for: colorful wooden sculptures of interlocking parts

Torso, 2020
Matthew Ronay

Casey Kaplan

3VL, 2021
Matthew Ronay

Casey Kaplan

Matthew Ronay’s sculptures evoke colorful machines, landscapes, and intestinal tracts. The artist handcarves and dyes wood, adding texture to his material using grooves, notches, and flocking. His forms contort around each other like puzzle pieces. Despite their suggestive nature—one segment may look like a tongue, another a tree trunk or aorta—the completed sculptures always veer from easy resolution. Instead, Ronay’s colorful arrangements play with balance, suspension, and the relationship between the part and the whole.

Ronay, like Anderson, approaches color with a meticulous eye. He recently honed his palette even further by collaborating with the graphic designer (and his life partner) Bengü to develop powder-based dyes that match bodily organs. And while Ronay shares a vaguely Seussian aesthetic with Anderson (and with Party, too), there’s also a darker side to their work: Ronay’s sculptures can suggest bodily breakdown, while Anderson has touched on war, suicide, and loss. Yet, the artists leave their viewers with feelings of brightness and buoyancy that transcend these heavier themes.

Gala Porras-Kim

B. 1984, Bogotá. Lives and works in London and Los Angeles.

Known for: reimagining the cabinet of curiosities

Rongorongo text K (RR19), living and non living, 2017
Gala Porras-Kim

Labor

Every Wes Anderson movie is like a dollhouse populated with colorful, novel characters and objects. In this way, his films evoke the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities— a 16th-century phenomenon in which the wealthy displayed eclectic collections of artifacts. Notably, the Wunderkammer inspired “Il sarcofago di Spitzmaus e altri tesori,” (“Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures”), the 2018 exhibition that Anderson curated at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna with his partner, the costume designer and illustrator Juman Malouf.

Artist Gala Porras-Kim, too, takes inspiration from the Wunderkammer, though to different ends. In her drawings and paintings, she renders compartments filled with artifacts. She has cataloged the Mayan objects dredged from the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza, Mexico, which now reside at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, as well as the ceramics from west Mexico in LACMA’s collection. One ambitious, four-panel work titled 530 National Treasures (2023) depicts heritage items from North and South Korea.

Altogether, her body of work suggests the power of images to convey cultural and aesthetic histories. It positions the artist as a curator who tends not just to objects but to broader sociopolitical narratives as well.

Florine Stettheimer

B. 1871, Rochester, New York. D. 1944, New York.

Known for: whimsical representations of fin de siècle New York

Spring Sale at Bendel’s , 1921
Florine Stettheimer

Norton Museum of Art

Fete on the Lake, unknown
Florine Stettheimer

Avery Library

Florine Stettheimer painted the pleasures and whimsies of upper-class life in New York at the turn of the century. The artist’s handling of paint was confectionary, though her scenes were progressive, too: She rendered gender-fluid figures and her own nude body with openness and joy.

Stettheimer’s scenes embrace brightness and decadence. Her subjects included oversized flowers that dwarf human figures, or a department store bursting with sumptuous fabrics and energy. Stettheimer and her sisters also hosted a salon at their Manhattan home, gathering the artists of their day into a close community.

Anderson has similarly focused on a wealthy milieu, from the prep school boys in Rushmore (1998) to the rich New York family at the heart of The Royal Tenenbaums. Having money doesn’t solve these characters’ problems. It does, however, give Anderson a premise upon which to build lush visual worlds: His characters can hang a Renoir on their walls, or attend summer camp, or purchase a ticket to India. Anderson has also become a community-builder in his own way, with a recurring cast of collaborators who cowrite his scripts (Owen Wilson, Roman Coppola) and perform in his productions.

Becky Suss

B. 1980, Philadelphia. Lives and works in Philadelphia.

Known for: bright, flattened depictions of domestic interiors and adornments

Dining Room (Wharton Esherick), 2018
Becky Suss

Fleisher/Ollman

Tramp Art Shelf With Mirror, 2024
Becky Suss

Jack Shainman Gallery

Becky Suss’s paintings of domestic settings are always devoid of their human inhabitants. Chairs, tables, and beds become the main characters, given personalities by the artist’s flat patterns and bright hues. In these images, a bedroom, observatory, or fireplace becomes a world unto itself.

Suss’s empty interiors raise questions about those who aren’t pictured: namely, the domestic laborers who keep these dwellings so tidy. The artist takes inspiration from both photography and memory, considering their intertwined nature in contemporary life.

Anderson manifests a similar reverence for interior design. Whether his setting is a hotel, a submarine, or a stately home, the director’s quirky decorative choices tell stories all their own. In a shot from Asteroid City, for example, Scarlett Johansson’s character gazes out a bathroom window. Behind her, a set of curtains suggest an internal tension between openness and concealment. Anderson’s characters and their surroundings are deeply intertwined.

Nguan

B. 1973, Singapore. Lives and works in Singapore.

Known for: colorful, melancholy architectural shots

Nguan’s images of Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Singapore depict lonely cities bathed in beautiful light. The artist relishes the solitude of these sprawling locales and gives them warmth via careful compositions. For his part, Nguan embraces the sort of urban anonymity that he captures in his photos: It’s difficult to discover his full name or additional details about his life.

In his series depicting his own hometown, Singapore, Nguan captures long, shadowed outdoor walkways and the spiral staircases that adorn homes’ exteriors. His lens finds a man reclining on a slide and a rainbow painted across an apartment building. Nguan’s body of work recalls Freud’s definition of melancholia: the feeling of loss without a clear idea of what’s gone.

Anderson’s vision has its own melancholia. His characters long for love, connection, and their own youthful pasts, and his alternately brilliant and muted palettes suggest both passion and loss. Artmaking is often a search for lost time (so says Proust), and Anderson and Nguan convey the haziness of personal history via beautiful scenes.

Dean West

B. 1983, Australia. Lives and works in Miami.

Known for: highly stylized photographs of Americana

Bus, 2012
Dean West

Avant Gallery

Australia-born, U.S.-based photographer Dean West trains his lens on dynamic scenes of his adoptive home country. Such vivid images include a bus stop in front of a stucco building with a striped awning, a tilted palm tree in front of a Los Angeles gallery, and a wrangler facing down his reptilian target in Boca Raton, Florida. In West’s shots, a crisp hyperreal style coalesces with strange or unexpected details, creating a sense of a country where everything’s just a little off-kilter.

Anderson similarly negotiates between the normal and absurd. He offsets his whimsical dramas and aesthetics with unadorned pathos: the pain of romantic yearning and family dysfunction, for example, or the frustrations of creative production. Weirdness works best, of course, if it’s got heart.

Laurie Simmons

B. 1949, Far Rockaway, New York. Lives and works in New York.

Known for: poignant photographs of dolls

Walking Cake (Color), 1989
Laurie Simmons

Independent Curators International (ICI)

Coral Living Room with Lillies, 1983
Laurie Simmons

Adam Baumgold Gallery

The Pictures Generation photographer Laurie Simmons gained renown in the 1970s for her shots of dolls—often female, frequently placed in miniature domestic settings. Since then, the artist has continued to raise questions about femininity and its attendant expectations. In more recent series, Simmons worked with Alvin Ailey dancers, photographing them wearing heavy costumes resembling inanimate objects. In the resulting images, a home, camera, cake, and more seem to dance around on a pair of legs. The psychological weight of all these objects—each one a site of memory and longing—becomes literal.

Anderson similarly uses miniatures to articulate his ideas. He constructed his Grand Budapest Hotel and the entire desert town of Asteroid City as models, not life-sized sets. Anderson outsourced this fabrication work to model maker and frequent collaborator Simon Weisse. Architectural illusions are key to the works of both Anderson and Simmons: Sleight of hand, in each case, allows these artists to get at something real.