What does it mean to paint now, in an image-saturated world where every moment can be captured in high resolution and consumed within seconds? Recent contemporary painting trends suggest a widespread desire to slow down, distort, or even rupture the act of seeing. Across international exhibitions, artists are embracing blur, residue, surrealism, and dream logic. Their work suggests that painting remains a powerful site not only for image-making, but for reckoning with what lies just outside clarity—whether psychological, ecological, or metaphysical.
Surrealism Returns: How Contemporary Artists Are Reimagining the Uncanny
The 2022 Venice Biennale was part of a mass resurgence of interest in Surrealism. Many contemporary painters adapt Surrealist legacies in their own work, which can be seen in a number of recent exhibitions. In New York, Robilant+Voena’s exhibition “A Mysterious Vision: The Uncanny and Lingering Influences of Surrealism in Contemporary Art” (May 7–June 17, 2025; traveling to Milan this fall) tracks this. Curator Robert Zeller, expanding on his recent book, grouped 16 artists into four categories: The Psychic Landscape, The Psychic Interior, Non-Objective Fragments, and Uncanny Figuration. The show pairs contemporary painters, including Alicia Adamerovich, Jamie Adams, Ginney Casey, Vincent Desiderio, Lars Elling, and Lola Gil, with historical Surrealists.
Beyond a slew of recent institutional exhibitions and the 100th anniversary of Surrealism in 2024, it is not hard to understand the current fascination with the movement. Its interest in the strange, subconscious dream world is a fitting subject for the seemingly unreal contradictions to life as we know it today, where apocalyptic visions of the planet’s destruction, wars, and violence live alongside the goings-on of everyday life.
Sun Yitian, in her Berlin exhibition “Romantic Room” at Esther Schipper (May 2–31, 2025), staged hyperreal paintings of mass-produced toys in dramatic, unlikely settings. Though the toys—like inflatable houses and dolls—exist in the real world and are produced in China, Yitian places them in dreamlike compositions that invoke art-historical scenes and expose deeper social realities.
At Mendes Wood DM in Paris, Paula Siebra’s show “O Estranho Familiar (The Strangely Familiar)” (through June 25, 2025) depicts uncanny subjects in earthen tones that evoke ancient motifs. The gallery notes that Magritte’s influence looms large. In a previous show at the same gallery, Sanam Khatibi’s glossy still lifes and Renaissance-inspired landscapes combine sensuality and idyllic nature with violence, in a comparable vein to the style of Surrealist writer and artist Valentine Penrose, per one example given in the exhibition text. Khatibi is also featured in “Painting After Painting – Contemporary Survey From Belgium” at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, where her paintings place skeletons, creatures, and tangled limbs around crystal-clear bodies of water.