Courtney Dootson
Graphic Design Student
Pilar Zeta
Pilar Zeta is an Argentinean artist, graphic designer, and fashion designer, who is best known for her surrealist album covers. She has designed album covers for labels such as Island Records, Big Beat Records, Ultramajic, Get Physical, Visionquest, and Fool's Gold Records, many of which are associated with electronic dance music. At the start of her career, she was an exchange student in the US and with in a year she was hired to be a graphic designer without secondary training and started to create album covers. By 2009, she moved to Berlin to exhibit her art in museums from London to Moscow.
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In 2010, she founded the agency 'RAD' and by 2011,she worked for clients such as Island Records, Big Beat Records and became a part of the art collective called OUTLAND, along with Daniela Huerta, Leandro Quintero, Camille Blake, Sandrine Nicoletta and Clemence de la Tourdupin. The group had many exhibitions and art shows, but sooner or later they separated. In 2012, she continued to work for RAD, and by 2013, she designed albums for Visionquest, Mobilee, Supernature, Jimmy Edgar, Tiga, Roosevelt, and Disclosure. By spring 2014, RAD closed and she then returned to Los Angeles and continued to create her own clothing. According to Pilar Zeta's website, "the fashion and lifestyle brand was influenced by their fascination with the cosmos, neo-classical sculpture, and time travel."
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In 2015, Pilar Zeta did art direction for Coldplay's album A Head Full of Dreams and before designing the album art, she collaborated with them to make an art studio in London, for it she made a 3 meters handmade collage including the childhood images of the artist. A kaleidoscope version of this collage was used as the cover art of the album including a colorful version of the flower of life designed by her.
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For her overall theme, her inspiration was from the Ancient Egypt and the metaphysical and she would describe her work as "retro-futuristic-mystical-art". Overall, I think her work is very urban like and a lot of people around my age would like the designs that she produces, and they would find them pleasing to the eye.