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Five Questions with… Vertical Gallery’s Patrick Hull

It’s shaping up to be a busy summer for Vertical Gallery, highlighted by the biennial return of longtime favorite Collin van der Sluijs. ’Wanderland,’ Collin’s sixth solo show in Chicago, runs July 10 through Aug. 22 in partnership with Irving Park’s Joy Machine Gallery, accompanied by the release of the Dutch painter, muralist and graffiti writer’s first comprehensive career retrospective book. Vertical’s third-quarter slate also includes the debut American print release from UK mosaic maker Florist as well as ‘Ascending,’ a globe-trotting group show spotlighting the next generation of artists poised to take over your walls. Vertical owner Patrick Hull reveals all in the latest installment of our web-exclusive Five Questions with… series.  

Question 1: What can you tell us about Collin van der Sluijs’ ‘Wanderland’? 

Patrick Hull: It's gonna be a beautiful exhibition. It’s a wide range of work in Collin’s signature style, and if you think you know what to expect based on his earlier solo shows, think again.

There’s something for everyone in this show, including a selection of small drawings starting around $300, some mid-sized canvases and what Collin calls BACs — “big-ass canvases” — priced up to $15,000. A couple of the BACs are inspired by his small, mixed-media watercolor drawings, but these are giant versions that he calls “Watercolor XLs.” There are also two skate decks, along with a whole series of small paintings that kind of blend in with them. Collin painted on skate decks back in the day, and this is the first time he’s returned to that. 

We first showed Collin back in 2016, and we keep bringing him back every two years. (The photo above is from our first meeting in Brussels 11 years ago; he's on the right, I'm on the left.) As soon as Collin finishes one show, we plan another, and he starts working on it — in fact, he began one of the drawings and one of the paintings in ‘Wanderland’ right after he got home from Chicago in 2024. He starts on something, adds layers of oil paint or mixed media or whatever it is, and just lets it form over time. 

Question 2: What else do you have in store to make this exhibit one for the ages?

We’re publishing a monograph, ‘Wanderland: 1991-2026.’ It’s the first comprehensive book of Collin’s career. It's a really personal project for him: It goes back to the very beginning, when he first discovered graffiti, and continues all the way up to this current exhibition. Almost all of the wall murals that he's done over time are included, and he contributes commentary on many different projects. It’s a really exciting book — [writer] Jason Ankeny and I have been working on it for close to a year. 

‘Wanderland: 1991-2026’ is a 180-page, full-color hardcover, strictly limited to 175 copies total. The regular version of the book is priced at $85. There’s also a deluxe version limited to 30 copies. It’s the same physical book, only it’s signed by Collin and includes an original watercolor drawing. It's a really great way to get one of his originals, and each buyer gets to pick the drawing they want. You also get a signed mini-print. 

The deluxe edition is priced at $275. If you do the math, the book itself is $85, and if you were to buy a small original drawing from Collin, it would cost you $250. Something like the signed mini-print would cost around $50. So it’s a $385 value that you are getting for $275. 

We started the pre-order on June 4, and we only have a few copies of the deluxe edition remaining. People who pre-order can pick up their copies at Joy Machine when the ‘Wanderland’ show opens Friday, July 10, or we’ll begin shipping them out July 9, once Collin arrives in Chicago to sign them. 

Question 3: Just before ‘Wanderland’ opens, Vertical is releasing a limited-edition screenprint from a UK artist named Florist. What do we need to know? 

Florist is a London-based mosaic street artist who’s found his own unique style. I followed him on social media before connecting with him through Patrick Coulson at Always Art, which provides Florist’s certificates of authenticity. Patrick thought Florist and Vertical would be a really good match, and after discussing ways we could work together, we’ll be releasing our first collaboration on July 1. 

Florist’s screenprint is titled “Stars, Stripes and Stems,” and it celebrates 250 years of the USA. It’s kind of funny that we’re working with a British artist to commemorate our country’s anniversary, but he's come up with a really fun image. It’s printed by Chicago’s own POP!NK Editions, and Florist found a great way to make his style work in a screenprint format.  

Question 4: Vertical returns to Chicago in September for ‘Ascending,’ a group show presented at Frame Chicago in Lincoln Park. Where did the title originate, and what does it mean in this context?

When you’re looking for a name for a group show, it's always a challenge if there’s no specific theme. Nowadays, the word “emerging” is used a lot for up-and-coming artists, and then there's “established” when somebody is well-known and further into their career. The title ‘Ascending’ implies these are artists moving to the next level, whatever that level is within their career. They’re all on the rise. I really feel like “ascending” should be the word or category for many of the artists that we work with. 

We will have 45 artists in this show, each doing two works sized 11 inches by 14 inches. There'll be some names everyone will know from the long-term Vertical family of artists, but there are works from several new artists, too, including two originals from Florist — his first time exhibiting in a U.S. gallery. 

It’s a great group of artists. To me, these are must-haves for every collection. We're really excited. 

Question 5: How will you wrap up 2026? 

We are returning to Aqua Art Miami in December, and then we have a couple of projects already lined up for the first quarter of 2027, including a very special project with Flog and a solo show with Jerome Tiunayan. We’re also planning our 14th anniversary show. There’s a lot in the works. 

Paper is the subject and the medium of Joseph Renda Jr.’s latest Vertical Gallery release.

“Drawn In,” a limited-edition print on sale now via Vertical’s website, celebrates the art of juxtaposition, contrasting how our planet appears in reality with how it might look through the eyes of a child — one armed with a box of crayons and a sheet of wide-ruled paper. 

“I wanted to explore how each person views things differently,” Joe says. “We all spend our lives processing what’s happening around us. Kids just have a more innocent way of looking at the world.” 

Joe originally created “Drawn In” as part of a collection of paper-themed paintings exhibited at February’s Affordable Art Fair Brussels. Whether shredded, folded, cut or crumpled, each sheet of paper depicted in the series boasts the Chicago-based pop surrealist’s signature fidelity to photo-realistic detail and depth.

Click here to purchase. 


“I like painting paper. It's fun,” Joe says. “It’s important to make stuff that's really serious and in-depth, but there's a point where you just want to do something that makes you feel good and makes you feel happy, you know?” 

Joe’s painstaking rendering of a torn sheet of notebook paper occupies the left-hand side of “Drawn In,” a contrivance for revisiting another of his favorite motifs: painted crayon textures scrawled in a child’s hand, a subject he discussed with Vertical Gallery late last year. The right-hand side of “Drawn In” further demonstrates Joe’s formal precision: Each element is vividly tactile, from the ersatz Crayola to the cottonball clouds in the summertime sky. 

“The whole paper series is inspired by childhood,” Joe says. “I want to take you back to the time in your life when you drew for the fun of it — not focusing on detail or technique, just going for it. I spent hours painting something that looks like it was drawn in five seconds. I'm not trying to make it look good. I'm trying to make it look exactly how a kid would do it.”  

There is a third side to “Drawn In,” Joe adds: the unseen image behind the half-sheet of paper. 

“The paper being on the surface blocks the landscape behind it. You don't know what that half of the landscape looks like, because there is a piece of paper blocking your view, and the person drawing the landscape is just kind of guessing what's behind the paper,” Joe explains. “It’s a staple surrealist technique: Masking the front so the viewer has to guess what they’re missing.” 

Vertical’s new print edition of “Drawn In” is signed and numbered, and limited to just 25 copies. The print is priced at $175. 

Click here to purchase. 

Vertical Gallery’s 13-Year Anniversary Show features 13 contemporary artists from across Chicago, across the U.S. and across the globe. But only one of these artists, Grant William Thye, can trace his relationship with the gallery back to its very first exhibition on April 6, 2013. 

Grant’s dazzlingly geometric, cubist-inspired paintings and collages reinterpret the shapes, structures and forms synonymous with everyday life. He was born and raised in Iowa, where he attended Central College, a small liberal arts institution 40 miles southeast of Des Moines. “When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an architect. I'd come home from school, and I'd spend hours up in my room, drafting. Cartoons were always big in my world, too,” Grant says. “I took a lot of art classes in college, mostly printmaking and drawing, but I don't have an art degree. I wanted to do art, but it didn’t seem like a way to make a living.” 

Grant instead spent close to a decade working a series of sales jobs, which led him everywhere from Cincinnati to Charlotte to San Francisco. ”I'd do good at a job until I figured it out, and then I'd get bored with it, and then I'd get a different job and go somewhere else,” he recalls. “Each time I moved, I'd get a two-bedroom apartment, and the second bedroom was gonna be my art studio. I'd set up my easel, and I'd put a blank canvas on it. When I got to the Bay Area, it finally hit me that the canvas I was putting on the easel was the exact same canvas I started with seven years earlier. In all that time, I’d never painted a thing. So I paid off all my student loans, got myself debt-free, quit my job and said ‘I'm gonna make a living as an oil painter.’ I had never in my life painted a picture with oil paint.”

Grant gave himself two years to achieve his goals, aggressively honing a flowing, dynamic aesthetic rooted in cubism — i.e., analyzing, breaking apart and reassembling subjects into abstracted forms viewed from multiple perspectives simultaneously. 

“The first time I saw Picasso, it made perfect sense — just shapes and lines, and using your imagination. You could even say I was raised by a Cubist [Central College professor of art Larry Mills]. He taught the last art class that I ever took, and I was the only student,” Grant says. “My first day doing this full-time, I went down by the Pacific Ocean and just watched the waves roll in. Somewhere in my archives I still have these big, cool Conté crayon drawings of abstract waves coming in to shore. And I'm like ‘It's the same shape as the rolling hills of North Carolina, and the clouds that you see.’ There's a rhythm to the world — the way things move. And it can turn into whatever. Even now, making my own shapes is what’s most interesting to me.”   

After a few months of trial and error, Grant launched an email newsletter to keep friends and family updated on his professional progress; recipients forwarded the newsletter to their own friends and families, and in short order he began receiving purchase inquiries from collectors throughout the country. Seeking a more affordable way of living, he relocated from San Francisco to Chicago in late 2007, making his first group show appearances the following year.  

“By the time my two-year drop-dead date came around on May 12, 2009, I was selling enough work to pay rent, buy food and everything like that,” Grant says. “Then I did it the next month, and then the next month and the month after that. All these years later, I’m still doing it.”

Grant first encountered Vertical owner Patrick Hull during the gallery’s grand-opening group show ‘The Young and the Restless,’ curated by Chicago street art legend Dont Fret. 

“When some gallery owners find out you’re an artist, they literally turn around and walk away. They won’t talk to you because they think you're going to ask them to look at your stuff, and they don't want to do that,” Grant explains. “But when Patrick learned I’m an artist, he said ‘Oh, really? Do you have a card?’ Two or three weeks later, I got a phone call: ‘Hey, this is Patrick at Vertical. I was looking at your website. I really like it. Do you care if we come over and do a studio visit?’ We talked for a little bit, he looked at stuff, and he said ‘We'd love to do something with you.’”  

Patrick initially planned to feature Grant as one-third of a group exhibition concluding Vertical's first year of operations. When the two other artists dropped out, Grant stepped up. “I said to Patrick ‘I don't know if you know this, but I work in three different styles. How about if I do all three shows, and we call it “Three Sides to Every Story”?’ He goes ‘I like it.’ And I'm like ‘Oh shit, now I gotta do it.’ I worked 12 to 15 hours a day every day to get it all done.”

‘Three Sides to Every Story,’ which showcased Grant’s signature figurative abstractions alongside regionalist-influenced landscapes and cut-paper constructions, opened in March 2014. “What’s interesting about Vertical Gallery is that the shingle out front says ‘street art and urban contemporary,’ but it encompasses a lot more than just that,” Grant says. “Patrick loves the art that he shows, and he likes a vast variety of things. I’m not a street artist, but somehow my stuff fits in with his style.” 

Twelve years on from ‘Three Sides to Every Story,’ Grant remains one of Vertical’s tentpole artists, headlining two subsequent solo exhibitions, 2019’s ‘Second Time Around’ and 2024’s ‘Release,’ and contributing to multiple group shows. For this year’s anniversary show, he and the other 12 featured artists were asked to deliver four original works sized at 12 x 12 in. (30 x 30 cm); Grant responded with a collection of animal portraits evoking Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other beloved children's books.   

“I originally planned to paint the giraffe and the flamingo in a different format — tall and skinny. It was fun scrunching them and changing them around to fit into the square format,” Grant says. “Some might say ‘Well, that's not right,’ but why is it not right? You can do anything you want with your art, you know?”

Vertical’s 13-Year Anniversary Show is on display inside Jackson Junge Gallery, located at 1389 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood through April 19. View the exhibition here.

Spring is here, bringing with it renewal, hope and the promise of brighter days ahead. This year’s spring season also brings Laura Catherwood’s luminous “Sunshower,” the second installment in our Vertical Collectors Club series.

“Sunshower,” which is available starting today, takes its title from the meteorological phenomenon during which rain falls while the sun is shining. Sunshower conditions often culminate in the appearance of a rainbow, provided the sun is at a sufficiently low angle. 

“You don’t see sunshowers too often, and when they're happening, it takes you out of the mundane, everyday moment you’re having. Suddenly, you’re in a more sublime space,” Laura says. “I wanted to capture that magical feeling.”

Magical feelings are the essence of Laura’s mysterious, often mournful paintings. “Each piece starts as this inner feeling that takes shape as movement — a gesture, like when you're feeling an emotion,” she explains in her recent monograph Gestures from the Field. “My work is an expression of the real world, not a world of my own making. It's like magical realism in fiction: there are strange, surreal things that happen, but they still happen in this world, not some other world.”  

The strange, surreal things happening in “Sunshower” include a deer in flight — an image that nods to Laura’s earlier “Flying Lesson (Dawn),” featured in Vertical’s September 2025 exhibition ‘The Scenic Route,’ which preceded the artist’s move from her native Chicago to Rochester, N.Y. The gravity-defying creature depicted in “Sunshower” embodies the painting’s central theme of sublimation, the chemical process of transitioning from solid to gas without passing through the liquid phase. 

“There are moments in life that take you out of your solid state and transport you to another, more abstract plane, and that’s what’s happening to the deer,” Laura says. “The deer in the sky is the gaseous deer. The deer on the ground is the solid deer. The deer-like cloud shape is a purely abstract, celestial version of a deer that's not grounded in any way. The deer on the ground is standing in all this water, and there's water pouring down, but because of sublimation, there's still the possibility of exiting the situation — being immediately lifted out of it, and going from your current state to something better.” 

Sublimation is also a type of defense mechanism, transforming socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations into socially acceptable actions or behavior.

“Sublimation redirects negative behavior from negative emotions towards something positive, like art or some other productive activity,” Laura says. “There's just so much negative stuff out there, and so much awfulness happening. ‘Sunshower’ is a reminder that you can take all these overwhelming feelings and redirect them towards something wonderful.”

“Sunshower” marks the continuation of the Vertical Collectors Club, a limited-edition print series featuring exclusive seasonal-themed releases commissioned from the gallery’s favorite artists. Laura’s print is signed and numbered in an edition of just 25 copies, and sized at 16 by 20 inches — perfect for standard frames. Like it did with Jerome Tiuyanan’s “Better Half,” which kicked off the VCC project, Vertical will also offer Laura’s original “Sunshower” oil on panel for sale in conjunction with the print edition.

Click here to purchase.

Vertical Gallery’s 13-Year Anniversary Show brings together 13 longtime collector favorites and emerging talents from across Chicago, across the U.S. and across the globe. One of the 13 artists, Asheville, N.C.-based pop surrealist Scott Mills, is making his first-ever Windy City gallery appearance.

Scott depicts nature at its most unnatural, bringing to life a multi-hued menagerie of otherworldly creatures — e.g., birds with antlers, moss-covered bears and fuzzy pink monsters. 

“My work grew out of a love of nature, combined with my interests in psychology and philosophy, toys and cartoons, juxtaposed colors and ideas, and spirituality,” the Detroit-born, self-taught painter says. “I usually do not plan my paintings out, and enjoy the surprise and challenge of letting the work slowly reveal itself.” 

Each artist featured in Vertical’s 13-Year Anniversary Show was asked to deliver four original works sized at 12 x 12 in. (30 x 30 cm). “My four pieces are an exploration of symbiosis and layers of existence that life can present,” Scott explains. “An example could be how something can be light and playful,  but at the same time have an intricate depth of emotion and meaning that is evident upon closer viewing.”  

Scott is excited for his Chicago debut. “So much music and art that I have loved has come out of Chicago, so I am thrilled to be able to show my work there,” he says. “I hope that people walk away from my work with a sense of playfulness, peace and awe at the beauty and strangeness of life.”  

Vertical’s 13-Year Anniversary Show is on view through April 19 in partnership with Jackson Junge Gallery, located at 1389 N Milwaukee Ave.

VIEW SCOTT'S ARTWORK HERE