Driving the continued momentum of 2022’s The Milk of Desires and the motion’s a centesimal anniversary in 2024, Surrealism—and significantly its long-neglected feminine visionary lineage—continues to achieve traction by means of public sale data and main worldwide exhibitions. However this renewed deal with Surrealism and surrealists is just not merely a matter of canon recalibration or market-driven revival. What’s unfolding seems to exceed the constraints of the “surrealist” label altogether, which is simply too slim, maybe, to comprise the breadth of what’s rising. Somewhat than a passing aesthetic pattern, this can be a broader cultural shift that engages not solely with the irrational but additionally with the symbolic, the psychic and the visionary as frameworks for each inventive observe and historic reinterpretation.
Seen alongside the parallel revaluation of Indigenous practices—most visibly foregrounded by Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Biennale, Foreigners In every single place—and the slower however more and more seen resurgence of outsider artwork, there’s a clear renewed curiosity in and rediscovery of spirituality and different types of information involving magic and mysticism. One latest exhibition in Milan, organized by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum and Marta Papini, supplied a very thought-provoking cross-historical curatorial framework for contemplating what’s changing into a broader shift in how curators are deciphering and framing latest artwork historical past.
“Fata Morgana: Recollections from the Invisible” introduced collectively the work of greater than 70 figures—from writers and philosophers to mediums, mystics and clairvoyants—in a present that unfolded inside the spiritually charged setting of Palazzo Morando, as soon as residence to Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, a determine on the margins of European non secular modernism whose life blended aristocratic privilege with esoteric pursuit.
The exhibition positioned ignored historic visionaries in dialogue with up to date artists by means of practices formed by mediumship, ecstatic states and imaginative automatism—to not affirm supernatural claims however to retrace how perception programs outdoors dominant rationalist narratives have traditionally expanded definitions of artwork and perception whereas quietly reshaping social, gender and political imaginaries. Right here, the surreal, the paranormal and the magical emerge not as escapism however as a silent revolution of the creativeness—one which feels acutely resonant with the shared wants of our turbulent current, and with what many up to date artists are already making an attempt right this moment, when learn by means of these lenses.
What emerges is a shared symbolic lexicon and narrative framework that seeks to reactivate artwork’s most ancestral, primordial ritual perform—utilizing it each as a portal and a metaphorical code to entry non-material realms of consciousness: dimensions invisible to extraordinary notion however reachable by means of altered states of thoughts. For these artists, previous and current, artwork turns into a instrument for recovering which means earlier than and past the ideological and extractive logics imposed by late capitalism, reopening entry to a deeper non secular essence lengthy obscured by each instrumental rationalism and the incessant noise of mass media and social media spectacle.
Most significantly, this type of transhistorical journey reveals how completely different intervals of disaster have traditionally produced comparable and recurring revivals of esoteric and metaphysical pondering—largely as a result of present explanatory programs stop to really feel ample. When political, financial and ecological frameworks lose credibility, the promise of linear progress—together with official canons and dominant narratives—begins to fracture.
On this context, the phenomenon can be learn as a response to technophobia: a rejection of the uneasy entanglements—already seen at the beginning of the 20th century and newly intensified right this moment—between rising applied sciences, para-scientific perception programs, disinformation and paranoia that more and more name into query shared notions of reality.
This openness towards this mediumistic dimension of artwork seems right this moment to be pushed by a broader cultural and psychological try and reengage with the non secular and psychic features of existence—realms that resist the purely functionalist and materialist narratives which have formed society because the Industrial Revolution and its technological aftermath. Even when these works seem as mirages or hallucinations formed by artists, self-taught creators and visionaries—”beacons within the night time of which means,” as André Breton as soon as described them—they nonetheless provide glimpses into alternative routes of seeing and signifying actuality at a time when prevailing frameworks have already begun to falter. They aren’t proposing options a lot as completely different modes of notion—symbolic and infrequently symbiotic—by means of which the truth of the cosmos, and our existence inside it, could be reinterpreted and reimagined.
Past the now broadly identified, record-setting determine of Leonora Carrington and searching as an alternative to artists reminiscent of Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini, we see that their work was fueled not merely by fascination with the paranormal, however by profound engagement with it. For these artists, the canvas functioned as a portal: an intermediate area between the bodily and the legendary, the imaginative and the psychic.
As foregrounded within the exhibition, for even earlier visionary pioneers of the still-uncharted paths of symbolic abstraction (e.g., Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton and Wilhelmine Assmann) artwork was in the beginning about creating a symbolic lexicon able to translating, typically by means of deeply particular person and transcendent states, the interconnected actuality of all issues. Their works give kind to “thought-forms” which are each summary and rooted in common constructions recurring in nature, providing what looks like a secret entry level into the collective unconscious. Notably, many of those artists labored on an epic scale, producing expansive symbolic narratives that flowed immediately from their creativeness, not not like prophets—or on the very least, mediums—of cosmic messages.
Working underneath the steerage of spirits and different supernatural presences, Hilma af Klint was among the many earliest artists to develop a radically unique type of abstraction—even earlier than Der Blaue Reiter. By her express want, nonetheless, this work remained hidden for many years: she forbade its public unveiling till twenty years after her demise, satisfied that her contemporaries weren’t but able to obtain its message. As Julia Voss notes within the catalogue, these works conceived as originating within the astral realm required time to be understood within the materials world. In her collection Primordial Chaos from 1906–1907—the primary chapter of The Work for the Temple, introduced in her groundbreaking first U.S. retrospective on the Guggenheim in 2018—she already explores cosmic origins and first dualisms, from female and male to heaven and earth, by means of a symbolic system of shade and kind rooted in Theosophical thought as a lot as in pure mystical illumination.
Across the similar interval, Emma Kunz developed a equally charged type of abstraction, drawing on ancestral ornamental programs used throughout cultures to attach with the divine. Working as a healer, telepath and artist, Kunz entered trance states to provide complicated geometric drawings meant to disclose hidden energies and restorative forces. As Swiss curator Harald Szeemann noticed, these works search to reestablish a common connection: by means of repetition and symmetry, Kunz created enclosed visible programs able to momentarily channeling entropy into order.
Between 1926 and 1934, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn produced some 2 hundred hypnotic photos marked by Artwork Deco refinement and infused with sacred geometry, spirals, pyramidal types and references to the third eye. These had been accompanied by evocative titles reminiscent of The Portal of Initiation (1930) and Yoga and Meditation in East and West (1933). A comparable generative power animates the work of Madge Gill—not too long ago spotlighted by the Gallery of Every little thing at Frieze Masters—whose obsessively intricate spiral motifs teem with female figures and spirits. Like af Klint, Gill hardly ever exhibited her work throughout her lifetime, insisting it didn’t belong to her.
On this lineage, the work of Emma Jung (1882–1955) is equally vital. Lengthy overshadowed by her husband, Carl Gustav Jung, she was nonetheless an important mental power inside analytical psychology, significantly by means of her writings on the archetypes of Anima and Animus. Her not too long ago rediscovered drawings and diagrams—a number of uncommon examples had been within the exhibition—translate dream imagery and psychic processes into symbolic visible fashions of each particular person and collective unconscious constructions, imbued with a distinctly female sensibility.
Nevertheless, whilst early because the 1860s, Georgiana Houghton was already producing her “spirit drawings” underneath what she described because the steerage of angels and saints. In these “sacred testimonies,” dense layers of looping strains and radiant shade kind intricate compositions untethered from the seen world, anticipating later developments in abstraction by means of wholly otherworldly means.
Within the Seventies, a pioneer of consciously feminist and political non secular artwork, Judy Chicago articulated what turned a defining framework for understanding the largely intuitive symbolic lexicons developed by ladies artists throughout centuries: the idea of “central core imagery.” This gynocentric iconography fused anatomical references with a non secular cost drawn from historical past and fantasy, starting from primordial goddesses and matriarchal heroines to visionary saints and ruthless queens. For Chicago, this archetypal female symbolic language could possibly be traced way back to the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen—the German author, composer, thinker, mystic and visionary whose music and imagery emerged from equally clairvoyant, intuitive patterns rooted in visionary expertise. Hildegard described receiving her visions whereas absolutely awake, along with her “soul open to heaven,” by means of what she referred to as the “reflection of the Residing Mild.”
Nonetheless, essentially the most compelling facet of the exhibition lay in its distinctly cross-temporal perspective, which paired historic visionaries with up to date artists reminiscent of Kari Upson, Andra Ursuța, Goshka Macuga, Rosemarie Trockel and Kiki Smith, amongst others—all sharing an unsettling, typically disturbing exploration of the human situation rooted within the rigidity between physique and psyche, right here reframed by means of a psychic and mystical lens that invitations readings hardly ever contemplated of their work. The exhibition additionally proposed new, revealing interpretations of sure postwar artists, underscoring how—even past any imposed minimalist framework—Louise Nevelson herself described her observe not as formal discount however as an effort to impose order on cosmic chaos.
Shifting like lights within the night time of which means and reality, all these artists share a brave enterprise into spirituality, magic and creativeness—not as escapist residues of a pre-modern world, however as websites of political battle actively suppressed by capitalism by means of its systematic disciplining of our bodies, time, replica and information. Inside this curatorial framework, that perspective additionally extends to artists reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, amongst others. Seen by means of this extra spiritualist lens, even Surrealist automatism might be reinterpreted much less as a psychological method than as a observe of listening to non secular or unconscious companies as they “throw open the floodgates” of the thoughts. Likewise, the long-standing rationalization of abstraction’s emergence as the results of artwork’s newfound autonomy—liberated from state and non secular patronage to exist “for its personal sake,” enabling free experimentation with shade and kind—begins to really feel like a handy rationalization after seeing the present. When seen by means of the practices gathered right here, it turns into clear that many early pioneers, together with Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, had been as an alternative propelled in the beginning by explicitly non secular drives.
The exhibition finally left me with an unsettling reflection: that a good portion of artwork historical past could demand reevaluation by means of a renewed and extra revealing psychological and non secular urgency, past any conceptually sanitized or purely materialist and formalist studying targeted on the ultimate object.
