{"id":20112,"date":"2026-01-12T19:05:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/12\/from-surrealism-to-seances-the-art-worlds-spiritual-turn\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T19:05:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T19:05:45","slug":"from-surrealism-to-seances-the-art-worlds-spiritual-turn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/12\/from-surrealism-to-seances-the-art-worlds-spiritual-turn\/","title":{"rendered":"From Surrealism to S\u00e9ances: The Art World\u2019s Spiritual Turn"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
As museums and biennials revisit Surrealism, outsider practices and Indigenous cosmologies, a pattern emerges that suggests a renewed turn toward spirituality, mysticism and alternative knowledge systems as tools for meaning-making in a moment of political, technological and ecological crisis. Courtesy Archivio Chiara Fumai<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Riding the continued momentum of 2022\u2019s The Milk of Dreams<\/a> and the movement\u2019s 100th anniversary in 2024<\/a>, Surrealism\u2014and particularly its long-neglected female visionary lineage<\/a>\u2014continues to gain traction through auction records and major international exhibitions. But this renewed focus on Surrealism and surrealists is not merely a matter of canon recalibration or market-driven revival. What is unfolding appears to exceed the constraints of the \u201csurrealist\u201d label altogether, which is too narrow, perhaps, to contain the breadth of what\u2019s emerging. Rather than a passing aesthetic trend, this is a broader cultural shift that engages not only with the irrational but also with the symbolic, the psychic and the visionary as frameworks for both artistic practice and historical reinterpretation.<\/p>\n

\n<\/section>\n

Seen alongside the parallel revaluation of Indigenous practices<\/a>\u2014most visibly foregrounded by Adriano Pedrosa<\/a>\u2019s 2024 Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere<\/a>\u2014and the slower but increasingly visible resurgence of outsider art, there is a clear renewed interest in and rediscovery of spirituality and alternative forms of knowledge involving magic and mysticism. One recent exhibition in Milan, organized by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and curated by Massimiliano Gioni<\/a>, Daniel Birnbaum and Marta Papini, offered a particularly thought-provoking cross-historical curatorial framework for considering what is becoming a broader shift in how curators are interpreting and framing recent art history.<\/p>\n

\u201cFata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible\u201d brought together the work of more than 70 figures\u2014from writers and philosophers to mediums, mystics and clairvoyants\u2014in a show that unfolded within the spiritually charged setting of Palazzo Morando, once home to Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, a figure at the margins of European spiritual modernism whose life blended aristocratic privilege with esoteric pursuit.<\/p>\n

The exhibition placed overlooked historical visionaries in dialogue with contemporary artists through practices shaped by mediumship, ecstatic states and imaginative automatism\u2014not to affirm supernatural claims but to retrace how belief systems outside dominant rationalist narratives have historically expanded definitions of art and belief while quietly reshaping social, gender and political imaginaries. Here, the surreal, the mystical and the magical emerge not as escapism but as a silent revolution of the imagination\u2014one that feels acutely resonant with the shared needs of our turbulent present, and with what many contemporary artists are already attempting today, when read through these lenses.<\/p>\n

\"A\"A
Exhibitions like \u201cFata Morgana\u201d are exploring today the fertile intersections between visual art and mysticism, paranormal phenomena, spiritualism, esotericism, Theosophy and symbolic practices. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Ph Marco De Scalzi<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What emerges is a shared symbolic lexicon and narrative framework that seeks to reactivate art\u2019s most ancestral, primordial ritual function\u2014using it both as a portal and a metaphorical code to access non-material realms of consciousness: dimensions invisible to ordinary perception but reachable through altered states of mind. For these artists, past and present, art becomes a tool for recovering meaning before and beyond the ideological and extractive logics imposed by late capitalism, reopening access to a deeper spiritual essence long obscured by both instrumental rationalism and the incessant noise of mass media and social media spectacle.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, this kind of transhistorical journey reveals how different periods of crisis have historically produced similar and recurring revivals of esoteric and metaphysical thinking\u2014largely because existing explanatory systems cease to feel adequate. When political, economic and ecological frameworks lose credibility, the promise of linear progress\u2014along with official canons and dominant narratives\u2014begins to fracture.<\/p>\n

In this context, the phenomenon can also be read as a response to technophobia: a rejection of the uneasy entanglements\u2014already visible at the start of the twentieth century and newly intensified today\u2014between emerging technologies, para-scientific belief systems, disinformation and paranoia that increasingly call into question shared notions of truth.<\/p>\n

This openness toward this mediumistic dimension of art appears today to be driven by a broader cultural and psychological attempt to reengage with the spiritual and psychic aspects of existence\u2014realms that resist the purely functionalist and materialist narratives that have shaped society since the Industrial Revolution and its technological aftermath. Even if these works appear as mirages or hallucinations shaped by artists, self-taught creators and visionaries\u2014\u201dbeacons in the night of meaning,\u201d as Andr\u00e9 Breton once described them\u2014they nonetheless offer glimpses into alternative ways of seeing and signifying reality at a time when prevailing frameworks have already begun to falter. They are not proposing solutions so much as different modes of perception\u2014symbolic and often symbiotic\u2014through which the reality of the cosmos, and our existence within it, might be reinterpreted and reimagined.<\/p>\n

Beyond the now widely known, record-setting figure of Leonora Carrington<\/a> and looking instead to artists such as Remedios Varo<\/a> and Leonor Fini<\/a>, we see that their work was fueled not merely by fascination with the mystical, but by profound engagement with it. For these artists, the canvas functioned as a portal: an intermediate space between the physical and the mythical, the imaginative and the psychic.<\/p>\n

As foregrounded in the exhibition, for even earlier visionary pioneers of the still-uncharted paths of symbolic abstraction (e.g., Hilma af Klint<\/a>, Georgiana Houghton<\/a> and Wilhelmine Assmann<\/a>) art was first and foremost about developing a symbolic lexicon capable of translating, often through deeply individual and transcendent states, the interconnected reality of all things. Their works give form to \u201cthought-forms\u201d that are both abstract and rooted in universal structures recurring in nature, offering what feels like a secret entry point into the collective unconscious. Notably, many of these artists worked on an epic scale, producing expansive symbolic narratives that flowed directly from their imagination, not unlike prophets\u2014or at the very least, mediums\u2014of cosmic messages.<\/p>\n

\"An\"An
Hilma af Klint developed her abstract visual language through spiritualist practices, conceiving painting as a means of channeling higher knowledge beyond the material world. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation Photo: The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Operating under the guidance of spirits and other supernatural presences, Hilma af Klint was among the earliest artists to develop a radically original form of abstraction\u2014even before Der Blaue Reiter. By her explicit wish, however, this work remained hidden for decades: she forbade its public unveiling until twenty years after her death, convinced that her contemporaries were not yet ready to receive its message. As Julia Voss<\/a> notes in the catalogue, these works conceived as originating in the astral realm required time to be understood in the material world. In her series Primordial Chaos<\/i> from 1906\u20131907\u2014the first chapter of The Paintings for the Temple<\/i>, presented in her groundbreaking first U.S. retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2018\u2014she already explores cosmic origins and primary dualisms, from male and female to heaven and earth, through a symbolic system of color and form rooted in Theosophical thought as much as in pure mystical illumination.<\/p>\n

Around the same period, Emma Kunz<\/a> developed a similarly charged form of abstraction, drawing on ancestral decorative systems used across cultures to connect with the divine. Working as a healer, telepath and artist, Kunz entered trance states to produce complex geometric drawings intended to reveal hidden energies and restorative forces. As Swiss curator Harald Szeemann<\/a> observed, these works seek to reestablish a universal connection: through repetition and symmetry, Kunz created enclosed visual systems capable of momentarily channeling entropy into order.<\/p>\n

Between 1926 and 1934, Olga Fr\u00f6be-Kapteyn produced some two hundred hypnotic images marked by Art Deco refinement and infused with sacred geometry, spirals, pyramidal forms and references to the third eye. These were accompanied by evocative titles such as The Portal of Initiation<\/i> (1930) and Yoga and Meditation in East and West<\/i> (1933). A comparable generative force animates the work of Madge Gill<\/a>\u2014recently spotlighted by the Gallery of Everything at Frieze Masters\u2014whose obsessively intricate spiral motifs teem with feminine figures and spirits. Like af Klint, Gill rarely exhibited her work during her lifetime, insisting it did not belong to her.<\/p>\n

In this lineage, the work of Emma Jung<\/a> (1882\u20131955) is equally significant. Long overshadowed by her husband, Carl Gustav Jung<\/a>, she was nonetheless a vital intellectual force within analytical psychology, particularly through her writings on the archetypes of Anima and Animus. Her recently rediscovered drawings and diagrams\u2014several rare examples were in the exhibition\u2014translate dream imagery and psychic processes into symbolic visual models of both individual and collective unconscious structures, imbued with a distinctly feminine sensibility.<\/p>\n

\n
\"A\"A
From these and other works emerge the mirages and hallucinations of artists, self-taught creators and visionaries\u2014\u201dbeacons in the night of meaning,\u201d as Breton wrote. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Ph Marco De Scalzi<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

However, even as early as the 1860s, Georgiana Houghton was already producing her \u201cspirit drawings\u201d under what she described as the guidance of angels and saints. In these \u201csacred testimonies,\u201d dense layers of looping lines and radiant color form intricate compositions untethered from the visible world, anticipating later developments in abstraction through wholly otherworldly means.<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, a pioneer of consciously feminist and political spiritual art, Judy Chicago articulated what became a defining framework for understanding the largely intuitive symbolic lexicons developed by women artists across centuries: the concept of \u201ccentral core imagery.\u201d This gynocentric iconography fused anatomical references with a spiritual charge drawn from history and myth, ranging from primordial goddesses and matriarchal heroines to visionary saints and ruthless queens. For Chicago, this archetypal feminine symbolic language could be traced as far back as the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen\u2014the German writer, composer, philosopher, mystic and visionary whose music and imagery emerged from similarly clairvoyant, intuitive patterns rooted in visionary experience. Hildegard described receiving her visions while fully awake, with her \u201csoul open to heaven,\u201d through what she called the \u201creflection of the Living Light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the most compelling aspect of the exhibition lay in its distinctly cross-temporal perspective, which paired historical visionaries with contemporary artists such as Kari Upson, Andra Ursu\u021ba, Goshka Macuga, Rosemarie Trockel and Kiki Smith, among others\u2014all sharing an unsettling, often disturbing exploration of the human condition rooted in the tension between body and psyche, here reframed through a psychic and mystical lens that invites readings rarely contemplated in their work. The exhibition also proposed new, revealing interpretations of certain postwar artists, underscoring how\u2014even beyond any imposed minimalist framework\u2014Louise Nevelson herself described her practice not as formal reduction but as an effort to impose order on cosmic chaos.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\"A\"A
Eusapia Palladino was a central figure of late-19th-century spiritualism, whose s\u00e9ances blurred the boundaries between performance, belief and early scientific inquiry into the paranormal. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Moving like lights in the night of meaning and truth, all these artists share a courageous venture into spirituality, magic and imagination\u2014not as escapist residues of a pre-modern world, but as sites of political struggle actively suppressed by capitalism through its systematic disciplining of bodies, time, reproduction and knowledge. Within this curatorial framework, that attitude also extends to artists such as Marcel Duchamp<\/a> and Man Ray<\/a>, among others. Seen through this more spiritualist lens, even Surrealist automatism can be reinterpreted less as a psychological technique than as a practice of listening to spiritual or unconscious agencies as they \u201cthrow open the floodgates\u201d of the mind. Likewise, the long-standing explanation of abstraction\u2019s emergence as the result of art\u2019s newfound autonomy\u2014liberated from state and religious patronage to exist \u201cfor its own sake,\u201d enabling free experimentation with color and form\u2014begins to feel like a convenient rationalization after seeing the show. When viewed through the practices gathered here, it becomes clear that many early pioneers, including Wassily Kandinsky<\/a> and Paul Klee<\/a>, were instead propelled first and foremost by explicitly spiritual drives.<\/p>\n

The exhibition ultimately left me with an unsettling reflection: that a significant portion of art history may demand reevaluation through a renewed and more revealing psychological and spiritual urgency, beyond any conceptually sanitized or purely materialist and formalist reading focused on the final object.<\/p>\n

\"A\"A
Installation view: \u201cSMB13 S\u00e9ance: Technology of the Spirit\u201d at Seoul Museum of Art in 2025 Photo: Hong Cheolki<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Since the pandemic, museums across borders have begun actively rethinking and reframing art history\u2014both by revisiting the past and reassessing contemporary production through these same lenses. Last fall, the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale offered an especially clear, curatorial and philosophically illuminating example. Held earlier under the title S\u00e9ance: Technology of the Spirit<\/i>, the exhibition explored the role spiritual experience has played in the development of modern and contemporary art, while also shaping many of the technologies humans have created.<\/p>\n

By foregrounding mystical, spiritual and occult instances as ever-present within artistic practice, the exhibition unfolded as an exhibition-as-s\u00e9ance, treating aesthetic practices as imaginative technologies capable of challenging dominant rational-capitalist frameworks. Moving fluidly between nineteenth-century mediums and contemporary artists engaging with shamanic, psychic and ancestral registers, the biennale staged an idiosyncratic exploration of how cinema, sound and performance have long served as rituals to empower collective perception and imagination\u2014inviting audiences into altered, more spiritually attuned modes of awareness. Notably, the list of artists at times overlapped with the Milan show.<\/p>\n

What struck me most when I visited during the noise and overexposure of Seoul Art Week <\/a>was how seamlessly the exhibition treated the supernatural as part of everyday life\u2014likely reflecting a more fluid worldview within many Asian cultural frameworks, where science, transcendence and spirituality have never been considered fully separate. In this context, spiritualism\u2014understood as a renewed form of animism\u2014has simply accompanied accelerated technological development, and in many cases has been amplified by the fluidity and dematerialization of digital space.<\/p>\n

Across the exhibition, spirituality was repeatedly reframed as technology and through technology, rather than in opposition to it. New media were often used as tools for reconnection between mind, body and soul: magnetism, vibration, frequencies and energetic fields recurred as physical metaphors, suggesting that what is often dismissed as hallucination or superstition might also be understood as a different way of perceiving the world\u2014one attuned to realms beyond ordinary sensory experience.<\/p>\n

This logic extended to what is often described as technoshamanism. Several artists fabricated devices, interfaces and mapping tools designed to connect with other worlds or dimensions\u2014machines for attunement. Even the work of Korean media-art pioneer Nam June Paik, in this context, was read through this lens. These works functioned as instruments of mediation and ritual, deliberately blurring distinctions between science and myth, measurement and mysticism. What emerges are practical cosmologies and technological rituals: architectures, healing systems, sound environments, choreographies and image-making practices that remind us how consciousness can extend beyond the narrow bandwidth of everyday experience.<\/p>\n

\"A\"A
Over the past decade, many contemporary artists have turned to alternative forms of knowledge for inspiration. Photo: Hong Cheolki<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

In its attempt to question and reframe our relationship with technology\u2014two decades after the founding of this historic biennale dedicated to media art\u2014the show was ultimately anchored in the ancient meaning of<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n

We can trace similarly mystically attuned curatorial approaches\u2014presented with varying degrees of explicitness\u2014across multiple exhibitions and biennials globally. The Kunstmuseum Basel, for example, is currently staging \u201cGhosts: Visualising the Supernatural\u201d (through Mar 8, 2026), an exhibition exploring Western fascination with ghosts over more than 250 years. Ranging from 19th-century spirit photography to contemporary art, the show examines how specters have been imagined culturally, psychologically, technologically and artistically.<\/p>\n

Even the tribute currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art to the mysteric and symbolically dense universe of Wilfredo Lam<\/a>\u2014shaped by Surrealism as well as Santer\u00eda, Vodou and Afro-Caribbean cosmologies\u2014can be seen as part of this broader trend. Likewise, the Jewish Museum\u2019s spotlight on the early works of Anish Kapoor allows, for one of the first times, his now-iconic practice to be read in relation to his return to India and a renewed engagement with symbolic and energetic dimensions of color, as the pure pigments he uses become a means of accessing and channeling spiritual realms rather than simply a formal or material concern. And the list could go on.<\/p>\n

Taken together, these 2025 exhibitions signal a wider institutional interest not only in art that engages spiritual, mystical or occult frameworks, but also in rereading both historical and contemporary art through more psychic and spiritually charged lenses. This shift should not be understood as a romantic throwback to a more poetic past, but as a meaningful and timely response to the limitations of purely rational, techno-capitalist narratives\u2014an alternative way of rethinking the relationship between imagination, technology and the physical world, opening up legitimate domains of artistic inquiry as well as timely cultural and existential reflection.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\t\t\t\t\"From<\/p><\/div>\n