Greek illustrator Nasia Stylidou, aka Decomposition, brings a six-year-old vision to life as an 85-piece holographic screenprint, placing a spiked-armored woman knight at the centre of a collapsing nebula through a collaboration that merges conceptual image-making with meticulous craft.
The image of a knight riding into battle is almost always male. Nasia Stylidou decided to put a woman there instead, and not to soften anything in the process. Star Rider: Killing a Nebula was conceived in 2020 and realised as a holographic screenprint in 2026, the gap between the two dates itself a kind of testimony to how long a strong image can wait for the right conditions to be made physical.
The composition places a woman in spiked armor on horseback, riding through clouds and into a swirling nebula, suspended between the earthbound and the cosmic. Her helmet is open. Her face and presence are fully visible.
“I wanted to place a woman at the center of a myth that usually excludes her,” Stylidou says. “She isn’t there to be protected or admired. She rides into the chaos herself. The nebula represents everything overwhelming and infinite, and she chooses to move through it, not around it.”
The title, with its verb killing, pushes against any reading of the nebula as merely backdrop: it is something confronted, reshaped and ridden through. Destruction and transformation held in the same act.
The visual language draws from medieval armor, science fiction landscape and storm imagery, placing something ancient alongside something cosmic without dissolving the tension between them. The decision to work in a monochrome palette of four greys and one black was entirely deliberate. Stripping away colour forces attention onto form, contrast and silhouette, with each grey layer doing specific structural work: shaping the nebula, building the horse, defining the armor. The spikes reinforce what the composition already argues: resilience and self-protection made visible through surface.
Printing on holographic paper introduces the one element the monochrome palette withholds: movement. As light shifts across the surface, the background activates, the nebula shimmers and changes, lending the print a quality that is almost alive. The screenprinting itself was carried out by Kostas, known as Eris, who handled the technical execution after Stylidou prepared the colour separations. He exposed the screens, aligned each layer and printed with precise registration across an edition of 85 signed pieces. The collaboration is essential to the work’s existence: Stylidou’s conceptual and visual development meeting Eris’s technical expertise, each necessary to the other.
Nasia Stylidou is an illustrator based in Greece working as Decomposition. Her practice centres on powerful female warriors and cosmic figures drawn from nature’s wilder forces. Her debut artbook Garden of Artworks, published by Relax Your Soul Comics in 2023, sold out its first edition and was reissued in 2024.
ARTIST LINKS
decompositionart.com
@queen_decomposition
Star Rider: Killing a Nebula, 2026. Screenprint in four greys and one black on holographic reflective stock, 50 x 70cm. Edition of 85, signed. Original artwork and colour separations: Nasia Stylidou. Hand-pulled screenprint: Eris (Kostas). All documentation photography: Nasia Stylidou.
