1. Kinder surprises and sentient handbags.

If you’ve ever looked at a yellow emoji and thought it lacked a certain avian menace, Swiss artist Delfino Fidel is here to fill that very specific void. Working out of a studio in Arogno, Fidel creates sculptures that feel like a fever dream curated by a mischievous toy designer. His portfolio features emoji-duck hybrids marching across gallery floors, Kinder Surprise eggs reimagined as grenades, and handbags perched on spindly robot legs. Using bright colors and a "pop" aesthetic that feels instantly familiar, he lures viewers in with objects that look like they belong in a high-end gift shop. Like, for example, a globe meticulously shaped into a supermarket roast chicken.

Beyond the initial "wait, what?" factor, Fidel’s work functions as a playful autopsy of our consumer-driven lives. It’s a clever bit of subversion; he uses the very language of pop culture to point out the contradictions of the modern world, proving that humor is often the most effective tool for tackling heavy subjects like identity and global paradoxes. It turns out that a charred wooden motorbike or a "bubonic" aesthetic choice can say more about our current state of affairs than a thousand-word essay.

2. A very literal stairway to heaven.

If you stand at the base of David McCracken’s Diminish and Ascend, you’d swear the climb never ends. This 31-foot welded aluminum sculpture, currently residing in a lake at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, uses a clever bit of forced perspective to trick the human eye. By tapering the steps until they narrow into a microscopic point, McCracken creates the illusion of a stairway stretching infinitely into the stratosphere. It’s the kind of piece that makes you want to contemplate your place in the universe. Or at least take a really good, perspective-bending photo for the grid.

In a culture obsessed with scaling and upward mobility, there’s something deeply satisfying about seeing the infinite climb rendered as a finite object you can actually walk around. It serves as a physical manifestation of the "grind," where the higher you go, the less room there is to stand, eventually tapering off into a point that doesn't exist in three dimensions. It’s a playful reminder that our perspective, the angle from which we view our own progress, is everything. It turns out that reaching the sky isn’t necessarily about the height of the stairs, but the cleverness of the engineering that makes us think we’re getting there.

3. A mountain-sized decomposing plushie.

Imagine hiking through the Italian Alps and stumbling upon a 200-foot-long, Pepto-Bismol-pink bunny sprawled across a mountain pass. This isn't a discarded toy from a giant’s nursery; it’s Hase, a massive sculpture by the Austrian art collective Gelitin. Knitted by a team of Italian grandmothers over five years and stuffed with hay, the rabbit was dropped onto the Colletto Fava hill in 2005. It was designed to be soft, climbable, and… disemboweled, with blue and red woolen "organs" spilling out of its side. For two decades, it has served as a surreal picnic spot where hikers could lounge on its floppy ears or take a nap in its knitted entrails, treating a giant plush carcass as a high-altitude daybed.

While most public art is engineered to withstand the elements for eternity, Hase was "born a corpse." Gelitin programmed decay into the project from its inception, allowing the harsh Alpine winters and local fauna to slowly reclaim the wool and hay. It’s a literal manifestation of the memento mori, but instead of a somber stone skull, we’re given a rotting plushie that invites us to frolic. Now that we’ve passed the original 2025 deadline for its total decomposition, the bunny is little more than a gray, skeletal outline visible on satellite imagery, a "ghost" on Google Maps. It’s a poignant, if slightly stinky, reminder that everything we create eventually returns to the earth, and there’s a certain life-affirming joy in that messy, regenerative process. It turns out the best way to contemplate our own mortality is by having a ham sandwich on a giant rabbit’s liver.