When Rami Metal walks through the scores of booths at the Armory Show, he looks not only for attention-grabbing paintings but also those that would make great puzzles.
“I try to find things that are more detailed and have more variance of color,” he said. “If you have 1,000 pieces and 200 of them are pieces of sky, it’s not fun. You’ll get through 80 percent of the puzzle and say, ‘Ugh, the sky.’”
Museum gift shops have sold puzzle sets of Impressionist and abstract masterworks for years, but there have been few options on the market featuring works by living artists who haven’t yet had their MoMA retrospective.
That’s starting to change. A handful of independent jigsaw companies, including Metal’s Kinstler Puzzles and Apostrophe Puzzles, have been licensing the work of painters virtually unknown outside the art world for their brainteasers.
Apostrophe founder Mandi Masden was inspired to launch her Brooklyn-based puzzle company in 2019 after she came across a portrait by artist Charly Palmer that was outside her budget. Her friend gave her a custom puzzle of the artwork instead, prompting her to think about how puzzles could make contemporary art more accessible to the public.
“I was really into puzzles as a kid, and I knew a lot of us had memories of them from our childhoods, but the industry itself felt stuck in the past,” Masden said. “I wanted to make puzzles that focused on celebrating the talent, creativity, and perspective of artists of color, while catering to a segment of the market largely ignored by the industry.”
Metal, also a passionate puzzler, found himself fitting together tiny cardboard pieces of Pieter Bruegel’s “The Tower of Babel” (c. 1563) and Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (c. 1490–1510) for hours at a time well into adulthood. It was while he gallery-hopped in Chelsea and breezed through art fairs that he realized that the worlds of art puzzles and contemporary art rarely overlapped, and became inspired to combine them.
Pitching the idea of producing puzzles out of contemporary art to galleries and artists before he actually launched his business was harder. But Washington-based artist Andrea Joyce Heimer liked the concept, and licensed a rendition of her 2019 painting, “In The Summer We Started Drinking During The Hot Of The Day And By Night Time We Were Monsters.” He launched Kinstler in 2021 with two additional puzzles by artists Simone Johnson and Rusudan Khizanishvili.
This month, Kinstler is releasing a new puzzle of Korean artist Ken Gun Min’s 2023 painting “Stranger by the Lake (Bare Ass Creek),” an homage to a nude sunbathing spot in Los Angeles that was destroyed in a 2009 fire. Min, too, has loved playing with puzzles since he was a child. He was fascinated by the fact that individual fragments didn’t make visual sense until he fitted them together. Now he sees comparisons between the visual riddles and his current practice.
“There’s a mix of abstraction and spontaneity — gestural brushstrokes, layers of pigment meeting embroidery — but when you step back, they come together to form a story,” Min said.
For Masden, a good puzzle starts with a compelling image that tells a story and has a strong point of view. She also loves discovering nuances of brushwork and the layers of depth in a mixed media piece.
“There’s something really poetic about the image that emerges from 1,000 tiny pieces of someone’s curiosity and exploration, and I love being surprised by where that journey takes me,” she said.
Both Kinstler and Apostrophe have recruited a diverse stable of artists who earn a commission for every purchase, and their games are available for purchase in museums and bookstores across the country. The latter also donates a portion of each sale to a nonprofit organization working to expand arts education for communities of color.
Lately, Metal has been drawn to work with subtle shifting color gradients and lots of visual activity. Umar Rashid’s “Battle of Malibu” (2020) portrays a fictitious uprising of Los Angeles-area Indigenous tribes against a European imperial force.
“You’ll spend four to eight hours or more with the work, and you’ll get to know that artist pretty well,” Metal said. “You can frame the puzzle, too. It’s literally an artwork.”