BLACKLANDS is a group exhibition focusing on the color black, created and curated by Zakarian.
This interview series continues directing the spotlight at fascinating artists working with the darkest shades.
Brutal Architecture and Desolate Ruins in MS Paint and Scratchboard : Pierre Barraud de Lagerie
25 February 2026
Between Chaos and Control : Bahrull Marta
14 May 2026Artist Interview
Tobias Holmbeck
Mazes of Debris and Violent Compression
Interview by Mariam Zakarian, March 2026
Anyone who has tried their hand at graphic design knows how difficult it is to create something that looks professional, but not sterile and void of emotion. So many perfectly designed layouts look lifeless, soulless and too clean. Here’s where this month’s BLACKLANDS interviewee excels.
I first became aware of Tobias Holmbeck the musician when a friend invited me to a concert with the noise rock band Narcosatánicos a decade ago. I remember being impressed that something so sophisticated and complex was formed by a bunch of guys in their early 20s in the (at the time) pretty barren underground scene in Denmark. Certainly, this Aarhusian orchestra had captured something truly unsettling and deliciously violent that I had an immediate, visceral reaction to.
Later, I saw the haunting live visuals accompanying the act; enter Tobias Holmbeck, the designer and visual artist, whose work I have followed since, as it developed both stylistically and thematically, growing ever sharper and more exciting.
Holmbeck is currently based in Copenhagen. An extremely prolific creator, he is involved in too many music acts for me to mention, and designs graphics and live visuals for an even greater number of musicians. In this interview we have concentrated on his graphic design work primarily, which he assembles in huge collages out of scanned and copied raw material.
He began getting involved in his local music community, making show flyers and artwork in 2009. He mentions ”stylistic challenge and community development” as a persisting core drive, and describes that ”figuring out how to crack different styles for a widening array of [music] groups” evolved gradually over the years until he started working full-time after earning his degree at DSKD, the design school in Kolding. Although he was easily bored by the subject matter at school and less interested in the commercial angles of design, he now admits he still benefited from design theory and methodology and now has a greater appreciation for those who ”go the other way and bring nuance and character” to their work.
Holmbeck primarily sees himself as a designer and emphasized clearly throughout the interview that his work is ”heavily dictated by the themes of whichever client I’m designing for than something personally expressive”. Yet, I find that these works are as evocative as some of the finest pieces I have seen on gallery walls. The significance and impact of this work might not be easily apparent to the reader, but this is one of those cases where the more you look, the more you discover.
The imagery often looks dense, distressed, noisy, distorted. And heavy.
There is an almost unsettling quality to how well the pieces are assembled. How methodically and thoughtfully they are combined, with great attention to typography, flow, negative space and texture. The shapes are immediately beautiful, in sharp contrast to how brutal the subject matter is sometimes when you look closely at the individual images in these massive puzzles.
There are parts of bodies, buildings, explosions, abstract fragments, rubble and unreadable, obscure symbols. Lines that repeat and get cut off. Silhouettes of pleasing shapes assembled by things that resemble unidentifiable organic matter. Every work carries masterfully crafted ambiguity. You can almost see whatever you want to see here, which allows the designs to perfectly straddle the line between commercial and experimental.
The result often looks like something industrial or mechanical, blown-out and distressed into sharp angles, claustrophobic and crowded. The black color is faded, used, aged and suffering. Copied into flat obscurity. The pictures are lifted from their original context and broken savagely into barely recognizable shapes and structures, corrupted and degraded into primitive forms, then crushed together and forced to cohabitate.
Enjoy them below and read the thoughts behind the work in their creator’s own words.
Q: Are there particular themes in your work that you keep returning to?
Tobias Holmbeck: I tend to focus my personally expressive work in music. But the works picked out for the purposes of this interview are a bit more uniform to fit with the general theme of your curation. A throughline on these is probably some kind of pull towards compressing sprawl; collaging a lot of high-contrast fragments and textures into something abstract and dense that could easily go on well past the bounds of the format. Some projects need simplicity and space too, but I tend to like the serried, ambiguous and distorted. Mazes of debris.
Q: What does your work process look like?
Very client dependent. Sometimes even complex-looking work comes together in a couple days, but even more minimal stuff can take some weeks to nail down every now and again. I like to do as much of the process with physical materials, xerox texturing etc. as possible, but sometimes time only allows for purely digital work. If I could realistically give every project 6 months+ of my undivided focus I’d be very happy, but maybe it’s also for the best that I can’t.
"I tend to like the serried, ambiguous and distorted.
Mazes of debris."
- Tobias Holmbeck
Q: Does your work arise intellectually or intuitively? Do you work from a philosophy or artist statement?
I have methodologies I follow, but loosely. I think design habits are foundational but I’m wary of ending up looking for the same fixes to everything. The motivation is always to represent the artist(s) or organization as naturally as possible while ideally adding angles that let them see their work in a new light as well.
When I sometimes do visual work for musical projects I’m directly involved in, I don’t necessarily feel much more “free” to just do whatever I want, it’s already sort of dictated to me by where the music has gone to. For things like Seizure Room or 绞刑 Lichtgedärm this leans into the high contrast corporeal and carnal in the general tradition of industrial electronics. For my noise rock group Narcosatánicos that currently means a lot of warped urban decay/amplification imagery, and so on.
Starting a new band or project and seeing a visual style start to shape itself on the side is always interesting.
Lueenas “Vølve”, 2026.
Videography, editing and title design by Tobias Holmbeck
Q: Why do you choose to use black in your work?
First and foremost, it suits a lot of my clients’ aesthetics, but a lot of my graphic work is typically assembled from different fragments from books, online archives, zines, photography and collaged into motifs. Making the end result fairly high contrast monochromatic pre-scanning and coloring just often makes sense for visual cohesion.
If I was doing this just for myself I’d probably do it most of the time, honestly. Same goes for my live visuals work, it’s just often a direct way to weave together otherwise incoherent sources.
"[T]he validating part of it is between the expressive impulse
and needing open-ended problems to solve..."
- Tobias Holmbeck
Q: Who and/or what are your main creative influences?
Front and center of course is always the work of others that I’m representing. I try to immerse myself in it properly before starting most design projects; even if you feel like you get something intuitively right away you should take time to understand where it sits in what they’ve done before, find the between-the-lines things that bring a better dialogue and make it interesting. If you find yourself trying to convince the client or collaborator later about a choice they don’t agree on right away, it also really helps to show you’ve really gotten into it.
On a more general level I of course draw a lot from other current and past designers I admire, but probably even more from the collective ideas of smaller music/art scenes, political and subcultural microcosms.
This week I’ve been looking a lot at some things I like from Stockholm’s contemporary electronics, some of the Central Java collectives, and the Tempe AZ scene in the 2010s as references, to name a couple.
Q: Is there an area that you want to improve in?
Very cheap answer I know, but there’s really no part of my process I don’t want to improve on. Recently, I’ve been enjoying some of my live visuals and video projects for artists like Lueenas, Francesca Buratelli and Rylan Gleave that involved the physical construction of new abstract objects. That’s been a very pleasing thing to get better at.
Q: Do you have a dream project that you would undertake if you had unlimited time and resources?
Knowing myself I’d probably just start on one thing and then just work on making that bigger and more complicated until the sun burns out.
Q: How do you feel about the commercial aspect of art? Do you exhibit and sell your artworks in galleries?
Very rarely and never felt most of my work particularly fit that format when invited to. If anything, I see it as more at home among a bunch of other well-worn objects than blank gallery walls. My design work is commercial in that it is ultimately involved in selling something, whether it be a physical album, clothing, a festival, a book, a performance or whatever.
That said, I do think they can work in a group exhibition with some similarly-minded artists, [depending] on what the core ideas are, how to ask questions about them, and how to represent them.
"[I]t goes without saying that this is a time of rapidly accelerating censorship
of anti-oppression causes and that's obviously a much more immediate concern."
- Tobias Holmbeck
Q: Do you have any experiences with censorship? What do you think about it and how does it affect your work?
No more regularly than others in the professional sense, I suppose. There’s violent/sexually explicit client projects that platforms would probably nuke but I don’t particularly care about all my projects having to be online anyway, at least not besides promoting the client.
Meanwhile, it goes without saying that this is a time of rapidly accelerating censorship of anti-oppression causes and that’s obviously a much more immediate concern. Maybe it’s frustrating that trying to use the largest platform you have to support visibility for these things will automatically tank the visibility of your [own] work, but that’s the cost of reliance on some of the most debased capital entities on earth, I guess.
Seek other avenues where possible.
Q: And finally, why do you create art?
I need to pay my rent! But the validating part of it is between the expressive impulse and needing open-ended problems to solve in a way that isn’t just dependent on blunt reasoning or whatever. Getting introduced to the work of so many really wonderful artists that I might not otherwise have is a gift, as is being able to support art communities and movements I admire in whatever small way.
Also, I guess musical/artistic collaboration has just become foundational to a lot of my personal relationships as well, sometimes even a little too much maybe.
Find more of Tobias Holmbeck’s works on Instagram.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like our interview with the formidable drummer and designer of the band Ulcerate, J Saint Merat.
And check out last month’s interview about dark architecture and archaeology with artist Pierre Barraud de Lagerie.