10 Questions with Lior Zelering

Lior Zelering’s connection to the art world began at the age of thirteen, with a board and four wheels. On the urban battlegrounds of skateboarding, where he left behind a few broken teeth, legs, and hands, he discovered life lessons that only the pavement could teach. Through skateboarding, he was introduced to street art and the do-it-yourself ethos, a space free from rules, hierarchies, and conformity.

Now based in Nova Scotia, Canada, Lior works as a freelance graphic and UX designer and digital project manager by day, while dedicating his nights to art.

As a pop artist, Lior’s work draws inspiration from his childhood heroes, popular culture, current events, and the digital world. His art pays tribute to superheroes, memes, punk bands, jazz musicians, and the cultural icons who shaped his worldview. Through a blend of humour and cynicism, his work reflects the modern social psyche, offering sharp commentary on politics, cultural polarisation, and human behaviour. He critiques both extremes, ridiculing social trends across the spectrum with wit and insight.

Deeply respectful of the history of art and design, Lior holds a particular admiration for the Dada movement, whose rebellious spirit, political satire, and bold fusion of design and art continue to profoundly influence him.

Lior’s creative process is primarily digital, though he often integrates mixed techniques that merge analogue and digital elements. His compositions feature striking contrasts, organic shapes, abstract forms, typography, and layered textures, resulting in dynamic, grungy collages that embody both chaos and structure.

liorzelering.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

Lior Zelering is a multidisciplinary designer, educator, and author with over two decades of experience in design, technology, and creative education. He is the Founder and Lead Instructor at Masters Design Lab (2020–2024), an internationally accredited online design school recognised by the British Accreditation Council.

Throughout his career, Lior has collaborated with clients across diverse industries, including pharma, retail, museums, and start-ups, through his extensive freelance design and digital marketing practice (2012–2023). His portfolio includes projects for the Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, OceanWP, B-Cure Laser, Digital Nova Scotia, and Unilever.

Earlier in his career, Lior founded and led a development studio (2008–2011) specialising in interactive games and physical computing installations for museums and visitor centres, serving clients such as Eli Lilly, Philip Morris, Colgate, and Teva.

A passionate educator, he has developed and taught graphic design, UX, and multimedia programs at leading universities and design institutions worldwide.

Lior also co-authored several books and contributed regularly to design magazines.

From 2002 to 2009, he founded and edited Adrenaline Magazine. This pioneering publication merged action sports with urban culture, publishing 20 issues and collaborating with brands such as Red Bull, Billabong, and Quiksilver.

In addition to his design career, Lior has held key roles in technology and publishing, including as Technology Implementation Manager and Photo Retoucher, where he helped integrate new software and prepress technologies into large-scale production workflows.

INTERVIEW

Let's start from the beginning. Your creative journey started with skateboarding and street culture. How did those early experiences shape your approach to art and design?

The terms arts and design are a little different: in art, I am reflecting my thoughts; in design, I am thinking about the client, user, and viewer. But in both cases, I want to encode a message and have the other side decode it.
Skateboarding is above all an art form; it allows you to express yourself most purely. But that activity came, or at least came, with an underlying philosophy that expressed freedom, thought, counterculturalism, anarchy, and a desire to avoid cliques and drama. With that came a lot of art by DIY artists who invented or modified a design/art language inspired by Dada, Punk design, grunge, and so on. This language included a mix of digital and manual design, layered textures, broken typography, collage work, contrasting colours, and a clear philosophy and message they want to convey. I am merely an avid student of these movements and try to implement my version of these ideas.

You've worked across many fields, from UX design and education to fine art and publishing. How do these different disciplines influence each other in your practice today?

I am a curious person in nature and spend a lot of my time learning things, often unrelated but somehow always related. As a graphic design software expert and teacher, I spent a lot of time trying to understand how software was designed, found a very fascinating world of design and research, and got immersed in it. UX is unique as it connects the right brain and the left brain. My graphic design background helped me think about the UX experience from many angles, but let's not make any mistakes, because, as original as you might want to be, this is all geared toward functionality. Publishing ismy early love, and I have published books and magazines. To this date, nothing matches the feeling of a book, and the opportunity a blank double spread offers a graphic artist; it has aspects of UX, as you need to convey data/text and think about the reader as well. When it comes to my art, I practically throw those ideas out the window as I am telling my story. I might utilise my technical knowledge, but in his case, this is my playground for ideas. I, of course, use typography, contrast, colour theory, and composition in my work, but I am not afraid to make mistakes. I have no customer or user to please, which makes it so much more fun.

What inspired your shift toward pop art, and how do you see it connecting to your background in design and digital media?

Pop art is one of the most open-minded and fun art movements. I like that it speaks to the here and now, uses cultural icons, and blends art and design. It is very flexible and can be used for critique, humor, satire or to be a coloful display it uses a lot of contrast and texture and mix media so for me it is just away to take all the tools for design that are usually used to "sell" a product or and idea and utlize them for something that is disconnected from a marketing purpose.

Humour and social critique play a key role in your work. How do you balance playfulness with commentary on serious or divisive topics?

Yes, well, the world is a funny place, and satire or social cynicism is everywhere; it's actually so bizarre that it makes my work easy. Without getting into politics, you can see how some Hollywood stars will pick one global conflict over the other to look "humanitarian," but it is actually to get applause from the crowd; they don't really care. You can see the collapse of woke culture after it was such a strong movement, just by people understanding that something doesn't add up. You can see the way algorithms control our lives, fake media, addiction to likes and views, all of these are serious things. Still, you can't look at them without being a bit satirical. In one of my projects, I display inspiring Disney princess quotes, such as "You can do anything if you just think about it," and, in the background, I show kids scavenging through trash bins in third-world countries. So I could have written an article about it, or, in my case, created an artwork that presents this concept.

The Dada movement clearly influences your aesthetic. What aspects of Dadaism resonate most with your own artistic philosophy?

Dada was a short-lived movement with such an impact that you can draw a line from it to Monty Python and to all recent satire. First of all, it was their philosophy, understanding that technical progress doesn't mean human progress, and we can see it every day now. They brought critique to a new level of sophistication and, using humour to convey deep ideas, they absolutely saw the future. Some of them were graphic designers who added typography, helped launch the collage movement, and used unique compositional ideas. A lot of artists copied Dada. I want to bring back not just the aesthetics and technique but also the concept. My work usually starts with what I want to say rather than how I will say it. I don't imitate nature; I am not into landscapes and portraits. I am not a traditional painter; I try to see if there is something I want to say, and if so, I will use the aesthetics and tools I like to express it, but the idea comes first.

Your process combines digital and analogue techniques. Can you walk us through how one of your artworks comes to life, from concept to final piece?

Yes, there is a well-known skateboarding magazine called Thrasher; it is the only print magazine still standing. I had an idea to deconstruct the magazine and create something new. So I got some old magazines and started cutting all kinds of tricks and images, and just looked at them. One concept that came to life is the creativity in skateboarding, so I found all sorts of creative tricks and pictures, and created an analogue collage. Then I scanned it and continued layering it with typography, digital patterns, textures, and so on. The thing is, I have been using Photoshop since I was 13. I am now 48. I am so in tune with these tools that I had to step out from the computer as it all looked the same. I also limit myself to working only in Illustrator for my digital work, even though I know many other tools. These limitations and working with analogue techniques help me be more creative.

As both an artist and educator, how do you see the relationship between teaching design and creating art?

Teaching is the best way to improve your craft, as it lets you dive deep into the content, challenge yourself, stay up to date, and receive valuable feedback from students. When I teach design, I mention how computers and now AI make our lives easy, but also very predictable, so you must, as a designer and digital artist, be able to disconnect from the screen and work with tangible things, draw, sketch, write, and so on, to get a clear concept and idea.

You've authored and co-authored several books. How does writing complement your visual practice?

Writing has always fascinated me, and it is central to what I love: media and idea sharing, music, cinema, writing, and so on. So for me, it is all the same. Of course, when writing, for example, my recent book is a young adult novel called Jeremy Carter: The swell of hope and fury, you have to create a story, characters, dialogue, scenes, arcs, twists, and so on.I utilise the same creative tools from design, such as contrast, concept, and philosophy. I visualise the scenes and the characters and have their aesthetics and physiques in mind. I als wrote a few book on design software which just helped me master the tools better and a book about contract in design which was a deep search of how contrast is used in design and what are the beahvioral / evolutional reasons humans use contrast, my thesis is that seeing contrast is an evolutional trait that then became an artistic tool, for example we like contrasting flavors like sweet and sour, we like contrasting stories good vs bad, we like contrasting colors in food and clothes. Then I showed how you can achieve contrast through typography, black-and-white, colour, size, and so on.

Your upcoming exhibitions, including Hopes and Dreams and Maximalist, suggest evolving directions in your art.What themes or ideas are you exploring in these shows?

I have a few interviews and features in magazines about my work and my art book, Scrap Book Propaganda, which showcases 130+ recent works. I am always open to hearing from galleries and exhibitions and joining in.
Right now, I am working on promoting my recent work and books, but soon enough, I will go back to creating more work as I keep writing ideas in my book and getting inspired by different things I see.

Lastly, looking ahead, what projects or experiments are you most excited to pursue in the next stage of your creative journey?

I am not a very good planner; I am more of an executer when it comes to my art projects. I am working on a new graphic novel based on the Jeremy Carter character and will probably get back to some new artwork, but I have no road map, although maybe I should create one.

Artist’s Talk

Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.

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