10 Surreal Painters Today You Need to Know

Surrealism is more alive than ever. A new generation of painters has emerged, creating works that move beyond the photographic line and image, which has been so dominant for many years with the TV generation, and into the imaginative, irrational, and surreal. In a time dominated by an endless flood of images, the desire to create what cannot be captured through photography, these artists demonstrate the ongoing relevance of painting’s ability to create a window into another world—as an escape, or an introspective dive into our unconscious or the collective anxieties of our time.

However, before we proceed, let’s revisit where it began, as Surrealism recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. In 1924, André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto, which has been regarded as the symbolic start of the historical era of Surrealism, which emerged most prominently in Paris and Brussels. The movement aimed to unlock the unconscious mind and explore dreams, fantasies, and irrational imagery. Deeply influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, Surrealist artists experimented with automatic drawing, dream analysis, and unusual juxtapositions to challenge conventional reality. While Salvador Dalí and René Magritte painted their dreamlike visions with striking precision, Joan Miró and Max Ernst pursued more expressive and abstract approaches. In many ways, Surrealism never came to an end; think of echoes of Magritte can be found in the works of Marcel Broodthaers, among others, and automatic drawing and the subconscious would remain pertinent throughout the 20th century.

What makes an artwork surreal, one might wonder? Is it surreal as soon as it depicts something that could not happen or exist? From that perspective, religious painting and any form of an abstract landscape could be considered as surreal. The otherworldly and impossible subjects were very refreshing after a focus on the raw reality of life through naturalism and more painterly explorations of mundane subjects, from Impressionism to Cubism. More importantly, from a contemporary angle, surrealism was also marked by the poetry of absurd encounters, exemplified by Comte de Lautréamont’s famous quote, “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Yet, these chance encounters were not random at all, as their bizarness is rooted in the subconscious, new symbolic iconographies, and the human condition. This latter perspective is arguably what has revived the most today, resulting in the following curated anthology of ten surreal painters today carrying forward this legacy in new and unexpected ways.

1. Michaël Borremans

Michaël Borremans (b. 1963, Geraardsbergen, Belgium) is a contemporary artist working across painting, video, sculpture, installation, and photography. He is best known for his figurative oil paintings, in which technical virtuosity meets deliberately ambiguous subject matter. Executed with the finesse of Old Masters, his compositions present surreal scenarios—a nude man lying flat within a mysterious red structure, faceless portraits of wrapped figures, human rockets, or cones enveloped in opulent fabrics. These works pair refined craftsmanship with an undercurrent of existential absurdity, rendered both haunting and strangely bearable through their formal beauty. His brushwork, often compared to that of Baroque painters such as Caravaggio, Velázquez, or Vermeer, evokes a sense of nostalgia while concealing more disquieting psychological content, creating a deliberate anachronism. Beneath the seductive surface lie latent truths about human instincts, desires, and darker impulses—sensations that may remain unspoken but are always felt. His paintings exude a charged atmosphere, filled with contradictions, subtle humor, and a persistent sense of unease. Michaël Borremans lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.¹

2. Julie Curtiss

Julie Curtiss’ (b. 1982, Paris, France) work spans painting, sculpture, and gouache on paper, with a focus on female archetypes, corporeality, and the surreal dimensions of modern life. Her highly stylized visual language draws from 18th- and 19th-century French painting, the Chicago Imagists, comic books, manga, and pop culture, all while engaging strategies rooted in Surrealism. Often featuring faceless female figures and fragmented bodies, Curtiss’ compositions are erotically charged yet psychologically ambiguous, using motifs such as long hair, manicured nails, cigarettes, and food to explore the uncanny in the banal. Her flattened forms, tight compositions, and matte surfaces create a dreamlike, cinematic atmosphere that destabilizes the viewer’s gaze, positioning them simultaneously as voyeur and participant. Sexual tension, fetishistic detail, and ironic humor permeate her work, which is defined by a deliberate interplay between the grotesque and the seductive. Julie Curtiss lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.²

3. Drew Dodge

Drew Dodge (b. 2001, Monterey, California, the United States of America) is a painter whose evocative compositions explore themes of identity, desire, and spiritual symbolism through a cast of part-human, part-canine figures. Set in moonlit deserts, ranches, mystical terrains, or by the sea, his works summon a visual world that merges tenderness with eroticism, chaos with calm, and pleasure with pain. Dodge draws upon diverse artistic traditions—from the structured compositions of European religious painting, to the allegorical power of American desert mysticism, to the anthropomorphic seduction of cartoons—creating layered scenes that feel both intimate and otherworldly, truthful and surreal. Using lustrous brushstrokes and a vivid color palette, Dodge transforms barren landscapes into lush, symbolic arenas where queer desire and spiritual introspection intertwine. Recurring motifs like animal skulls act as potent symbols of mortality and transcendence, encouraging both reflection and self-examination. Dodge currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.³

4. Matthew Hansel

Matthew Hansel’s (b. 1970, Front Royal, Virginia, the United States of America) paintings merge the technical virtuosity of Dutch Old Masters with the visual logic of contemporary pop and digital culture. Drawing on the influence of artists like Hieronymus Bosch and William Kalf, his meticulously rendered canvases conjure surreal worlds where classical trompe-l’oeil techniques collide with distorted comic figures, optical puzzles, and digital-age aesthetics. Hansel’s work invites viewers into playful yet unsettling environments—spaces where historical references, absurd humor, and existential inquiry coexist. Fascinated by the cultural shift from analog to digital, he describes his practice as a response to this transformation, remixing centuries of visual language into images that are as seductive as they are disorienting. Before launching his career as a contemporary painter, Hansel recreated Old Master works for film sets, an experience that continues to inform his engagement with art history, both as homage and subversion. Hansel lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.⁴

5. Kati Heck

Kati Heck (b. 1979, Düsseldorf, Germany) is a multidisciplinary artist best known for her large-scale, vividly detailed paintings that weave together disparate visual languages—from classical technique to pop cultural references. As a result, Heck’s work is marked by a bold visual hybridity: hyperrealist detail merges with cartoon-like figuration, and references to strip culture, film, and erotica coexist with traditional painterly craftsmanship. She has gained international recognition for her expressive fusion of surrealism, symbolism, and social realism. Her practice affirms the power of ambiguity, embracing a multiplicity of meanings where imagination takes precedence over certainty. Drawing inspiration from art history, literature, folklore, and her immediate surroundings, she frequently paints people from her own life—family, friends, neighbors, and herself—embedding the everyday within her complex, allegorical worlds. Her compositions suggest a narrative logic but resist easy interpretation, oscillating between the familiar and the surreal, the personal and the universal. Her works often resemble visual collages in which figures, symbols, and objects are layered into enigmatic and theatrical tableaux, creating a new and surreal entity. Alongside painting, her practice encompasses drawing, collage, textile, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Heck lives and works in Pulle, near Antwerp, Belgium.⁵

6. Rae Klein

Rae Klein (b. 1995, Michigan, the United States of America) is a painter whose work navigates the blurry thresholds between memory and meaning, where tense atmospheres and elusive figures emerge from richly layered oil surfaces. Working in a restrained, self-imposed process, she often juxtaposes smooth, rendered forms with textural, gestural marks—inviting the viewer into scenes that feel both archetypal and freshly uncanny. Drawing on a vocabulary of recurring motifs—curtains, candles, skulls, animals—Klein constructs enigmatic, liminal spaces that evoke the surreal while remaining deeply grounded in emotional resonance. Her oil paintings often begin with found imagery—sourced from antique shops, eBay, or thrift stores—and are built up through a careful process of layering, subtracting, and reworking, resulting in compositions that feel simultaneously constructed and intuitive. Rae Klein lives and works in Grass Lake, Michigan.⁶

7. GaHee Park

GaHee Park (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-American painter whose vibrant, surreal domestic scenes explore the intimate terrain of desire, doubling, and psychological ambiguity. Often likened in style to the so-called “naive” aesthetic of artists like Henri Rousseau, her work deliberately unsettles with subject matter that is anything but innocent. Erotic entanglements unfold in domestic interiors populated by ripe fruit, dead fish, and patterned fabrics, where perspectives bend and space collapses under the weight of psychological tension. Tables tilt, objects threaten to fall, and mirror-like elements replicate entire scenes with subtle distortions—as if being stuck between dream and waking life. Park’s paintings oscillate between sensual immediacy and detached observation. Her figures often appear in solitary contemplation, but are haunted by ghostly doubles—extra limbs, overlapping faces, or bluish shadows—suggesting the presence of inner contradictions or subconscious impulses. Through a meticulous focus on surface textures—such as wood grain, brocade, and glass—Park flattens pictorial space into patterned thresholds. Still life elements abound, but their classical associations are subverted: a severed finger might rest among peaches and wine, or a dead fly becomes a memento mori on a tablecloth. Drawing on surrealist strategies, Park creates scenes of suspended time and unresolved tension, where eroticism and mortality quietly coexist. Park lives and works in Montreal, Canada.⁷

8. Emily Mae Smith

Emily Mae Smith (b. 1979, Austin, Texas, the United States of America) is a painter whose visually vibrant and conceptually layered works draw upon historical movements such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Art Nouveau, and Pop Art. With a keen sense of humor and formal precision, her paintings offer sharp commentary on contemporary themes including gender, sexuality, capitalism, and violence. At the center of her evolving visual lexicon is an anthropomorphic broomstick figure—both a satirical self-portrait and a polyvalent symbol. At once a painter’s tool, a domestic object linked to women’s labor, and a phallic surrogate, the broom becomes a vehicle through which Smith reclaims art history’s canonical narratives and gives form to subjectivities often excluded from visual culture. Throughout her work, Smith disrupts traditional mythologies and iconographies with a feminist perspective, producing images that are at once seductive and subversive. Her compositions shimmer with painterly skill and symbolic complexity, often featuring fantastical spaces populated by animated objects, bodily hybrids, and dreamlike landscapes. By reimagining familiar tropes with wit and critical edge, she reconfigures the terrain of contemporary painting into one of resistance, pleasure, and play. Emily Mae Smith lives and works in New York.⁸

9. Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch (b. 1960, Leipzig, Germany) is widely regarded as one of the most influential figurative painters of his generation. His richly colored, large-scale canvases unfold as intricate visual dramas populated by invented characters, objects, and settings that are at once familiar and enigmatic. Combining elements of realism with dreamlike distortions, his works often present overlapping spaces and incongruous motifs, suggesting broader narratives and histories while resisting fixed interpretation. Drawing on the traditions of European realism, Rauch fuses the recognizable with the uncanny, creating paintings that oscillate between historical resonance and surreal invention. His distinctive visual language has shaped contemporary figurative painting and continues to exert an enduring influence. Rauch continues to live and work in Leipzig, Germany.⁹

10. Ambera Wellmann

Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada) is a painter whose work explores the fluid boundaries between bodies, identities, and histories. Constructed from layered, wet oil paint, her compositions often depict indeterminate human and animal forms, merging ecstasy and extremity in spaces where the rational and the impossible coexist. Describing her approach as a form of painterly catachresis, Wellmann creates pictorial worlds in which contradictions—spatial, temporal, or bodily—remain unresolved yet formally coherent. Her practice draws from diverse sources, ranging from art historical traditions of the Renaissance and Baroque to digital imagery and everyday observation, collapsing distinctions between myth and the contemporary. In her paintings, figures, species, and temporalities intermingle, dissolving fixed boundaries to reveal painting as a site of transformation and intimacy. Ambera Wellmann lives and works in New York, the United States of America.¹⁰

Notes:

1. David Zwirner, Michaël Borremans consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
2. White Cube, Julie Curtiss consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
3. Semiose, Drew Dodge consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
4. rodolphe janssen, Matthew Hansel consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
5. Tim Van Laere Gallery, Kati Heck consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
6. Nicodim Gallery, Rae Klein consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
7. Perrotin, GaHee Park consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
8. rodolphe janssen, Emily Mae Smith consulted September 5, 2025. Perrotin, Emily Mae Smith consulted September 5, 2025. Petzel Gallery, Emily Mae Smith consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
9. David Zwirner, Neo Rauch consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎
10. Hauser & Wirth, Ambera Wellmann consulted September 5, 2025. ↩︎

Cover image: Installation view of “Matthew Hansel: Me, My Shadow and All of Our Friends” (2024) at rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium.

Last Updated on September 6, 2025