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Surrealist art is having a moment for many reasons—not least because, as a specialist friend once posited, the surreal is often preferable to reality, and offers occasions to laugh in profoundly unfunny times. As Gagosian’s Freja Harrell, who works with two surrealist artists, put it to me, “Surrealist imagery is resonating now because it’s the visual language of excess and estrangement.” No wonder, then, that the genre is booming relative to the rest of the somewhat lackluster art market—just look at the results of the recent auction of surrealist works from the Pauline Karpidas collection, which doubled its presale estimate.
The market for female surrealists, in particular, has experienced a well-documented explosion. In the past few years, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Dorothea Tanning all achieved world-record prices for their work, and in November, Sotheby’s expects to set a record for Frida Kahlo with El Sueño (La cama), from 1940, estimated at $40 million. This rising tide has also lifted the market for contemporary surrealism, with young talents like Swiss artist Louise Bonnet, who paints humorously distorted shapes with human qualities, and Polish artist Ewa Juszkiewicz setting artist records in recent years.
The size of the contemporary surrealism market is minuscule compared to that of the classic surrealists—Juszkiewicz’s and Bonnet’s records are, respectively, $1.6 million and $738,000, whereas Carrington’s is $28.5 million. But it’s growing rapidly. A recent report from Sotheby’s showed that sales in the contemporary surrealist category rose nearly 265 percent between 2018 and 2024. For the category’s female artists, the jump was more than 400 percent. While these figures are based on an extremely limited and subjective sample of just 15 artists, they gesture at the remarkable levels of demand.
But despite the hype, it’s surprisingly difficult to get consensus on what contemporary surrealism actually is—or isn’t. Robert Zeller, who wrote the literal book on the subject, described new surrealist painting as having an “uncanny” quality. But that’s a pretty capacious container. Another hallmark is a play on art history. “One of the important things about surrealism is that they looked back to the past for inspiration,” Zeller told me. “This is very different from other modernist groups that wanted to start over again in Year 0, who viewed the past as being derelict of value—deadweight.”
Churches and Dollhouses
Several contemporary surrealists are finding an audience with their subversion of traditional genres, from landscapes to portraits to still-lifes, with some of the most compelling work coming from young women drawing on Old Masters. Maria Kreyn, a Brooklyn-based artist, along with Juszkiewicz and her fellow Gagosian artists Bonnet and Anna Weyant, all belong in that rarefied group. “The underpinnings are the same, but the results are so different,” said Harrell.
Kreyn is known for her dramatically lit paintings in the Renaissance tradition of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. They earned her a Vanity Fair piece in 2018, followed by a commission from Andrew Lloyd Webber to create a series of paintings based on Shakespeare’s plays for a Covent Garden theater. Her more recent paintings, however, are J.M.W. Turner–esque: turbulent seascapes, with skies that look like unfolded origami. “It’s about mental puzzles, like ‘What does the world look like if your eyeball is a prism, not a sphere?’” Kreyn mused when I stopped by her studio last week.
The Russia-born artist works with Maria Vega of the M.O.N. Art Foundation to display the works in historic churches. Her fourth such project is an upcoming exhibition of dramatic seascapes at Fitzrovia Chapel during Frieze London; an installation last year during the Venice Biennale garnered her a great deal of attention. Soon after that, her only painting ever to appear at auction—Gravity, from 2024—made HK$4.1 million, or $525,000, against an estimate of HK$1 million, at Sotheby’s Hong Kong.
As for Juszkiewicz, she’s the poster child for contemporary surrealism: One of her paintings appeared on the cover of Zeller’s 2023 book, New Surrealism. She takes 18th and 19th century portraits of richly dressed women and obscures their faces, either wrapping them in sumptuous fabrics or covering them with plaited hairdos or elaborate floral arrangements. “Taking something familiar and putting a twist on it makes it easy for people to understand,” said Harrell, who works with both Juszkiewicz and Bonnet. “That kind of estrangement makes us see the underlying structures, how women were staged as silent symbols.” Juszkiewicz has a big 2026 coming up, with the publication of a monograph in March and the opening of a solo show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid in May.
Meanwhile, Anna Weyant similarly puts a humorous, subversive spin on historical tradition in her work. For her most recent project during New York Fashion Week, she took the familiar trope of a dollhouse and blew it up to life-size proportions at the Academy Mansion, complete with giant doorknobs, making her audience feel like the dolls inside. A wonky candelabra sat atop the towering dining table; the baroque-style dressing table was topped with an oversize hairdryer; a Disney-inspired fountain was in the center of the courtyard. “These pieces have given me purpose and comfort in uncertain and unsettling times,” Weyant said of the items she carefully placed throughout the house. Her best paintings have made multiples of their estimates at auction, with her $1.6 million world record achieved at Sotheby’s in 2022 against an estimate of $150,000.
There are a few more contemporary surrealist artists with shows to look out for this fall. The opening of Sasha Gordon’s first show at David Zwirner, featuring her unnerving self-portraits, was jam-packed in New York last week. In London, Victor Man, whose top auction price multiplied tenfold in 2023 to $2.2 million, has his first solo exhibition of his “psychologically layered” paintings at David Zwirner. And Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pairing works by Leonor Fini with up-and-comer Aleksandra Waliszewska in a show curated by Alison Gingeras. If you’re priced out of these artists’ markets, check out the program at Megan Mulrooney Gallery in L.A. Mulrooney sold out her booth of Piper Bangs’s paintings of biomorphic objects at the Armory Show, and is currently showing the unsettling, swollen still-lifes of Ginny Casey.