If you’ve ever fallen down an Instagram rabbit hole at 1 a.m. looking for paintings that feel like dreams, you already know the hunger this list was built to feed. The best modern surrealist artists to follow in 2026 are not the museum names from your art history textbook. They are living painters, photographers, and image-makers turning dream logic, the uncanny, and the unconscious into work you can watch unfold in real time on a feed.
I’ve been collecting contemporary surrealism for years, both for my own walls and for the artists I write about. What follows is a curated group of ten painters – plus a few honorable mentions – chosen because their work genuinely earns its place in the surrealist conversation. I’ve grouped them by mood so the list works as a mood board, included Instagram handles and gallery sites so you can actually follow them, and slipped in a short glossary of surrealist terms because the casual fan deserves better than jargon.
Table of Contents
What Is Contemporary Surrealism and How Is It Different From Classic Surrealism?
Contemporary surrealism is the continuation of the Surrealist movement – founded by André Breton with his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto – through living artists working today. These painters, photographers, and digital artists use dream logic, unexpected juxtaposition, and symbolic imagery to explore the unconscious, while engaging current themes like gender, technology, and identity.
Classic Surrealism, in the 1920s and 30s, was a literary and visual circle anchored in Paris by Breton, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst. Their project was partly political: to liberate the unconscious from the rationalism they blamed for the catastrophe of the First World War. Breton borrowed Freud’s psychoanalytic methods and elevated automatic drawing as a way to bypass conscious control.
Modern surrealist painters work in the same territory but with different tools and different urgencies. Three distinctions matter when you’re trying to place what you’re looking at:
Contemporary surrealism (fine art): painters like Julie Curtiss, Michaël Borremans, and Ambera Wellmann use oil on canvas to build figurative scenes where something is quietly wrong. Represented by blue-chip galleries. Shown at biennales.
Pop Surrealism (lowbrow): Casey Weldon, Mark Ryden, and Tom Grillo work in a sweeter, more cartoon-inflected register, often with big eyes, candy colors, and commercial gallery representation. Influenced by hot rod culture, underground comics, and Japanese kawaii.
Magical Realism: when a realist painting includes one impossible element – a shadow that moves, a building that floats – without the dream-state framing of surrealism. Think Alex Colville or some of Gregory Crewdson’s photographs.
A quick glossary for casual fans
Automatism: drawing or writing without conscious control, used to access the unconscious. Breton’s foundational technique.
The uncanny: Freud’s term for something that is strangely familiar – the doll that looks almost alive, the wax figure you can’t stop staring at.
Dream logic: narrative rules that follow a dream rather than waking life. Time loops, scale shifts, strangers who are also your parents.
Archetype: a Jungian universal symbol pattern (the mother, the trickster, the shadow) that recurs across cultures.
Juxtaposition: placing unrelated objects next to each other so they create meaning. Magritte’s apple filling a room is the textbook example.
Quick Picks: 5 Modern Surrealist Artists Worth Following Right Now
If you only have time to follow five accounts this week, start here. These are the names that come up in every curator’s studio visit.
Julie Curtiss – French-American painter, New York. Soft figurative oils of women, hair, and strange rituals. @juliecurtiss. Represented by Anton Kern Gallery.
Michaël Borremans – Belgian painter, working in Ghent. Quiet, opaque figures in rooms that feel paused mid-thought. @michaelborremans. Represented by David Zwirner.
Ambera Wellmann – Canadian painter, Berlin-based. Erotic, fleshy, myth-laden canvases that read like ancient scenes rewritten by a contemporary feminist. Represented by Perrotin.
Neo Rauch – German painter, Leipzig. The most important neo-surrealist working today. Crowded narrative canvases that look like socialist realism hit by a fever. Represented by David Zwirner and Galerie Eigen+Art.
Emily Mae Smith – American painter, Los Angeles. Bold, satirical canvases where a broom-headed figure smashes through art history and patriarchy. Represented by Petzel.
That list is your answer if a friend asks, “Who are the top 5 surrealist painters working today?” The next sections break the full ten out by mood so you can pick the work that resonates with yours.
Eerie and Subliminal: Modern Surrealist Painters Working in the Mood of Uncanny
These are the artists I find myself returning to when I want my feed to feel slightly off – the visual equivalent of a locked room. Their work lives in the territory Freud called das Unheimliche, the unhomely.
Julie Curtiss
Born 1982 in Paris, Julie Curtiss moved to New York after her studies and now paints the strangest quiet rituals of contemporary womanhood. Her canvases show faceless women, hair as a standalone character, green faces, small breasts with flowers inside them. The brushwork is matte and soft, almost like gouache on linen, and the colors feel plucked from a 1970s bathroom.
Her breakthrough painting, Not Sweet Not Food (2016), a kneeling woman licking a sticky green column, announced her interest in appetite, shame, and consumption. Curtiss shows with Anton Kern Gallery in New York and has been collected by major museums including MoMA. Follow @juliecurtiss for new studio shots.
Michaël Borremans
Born 1963 in Geraardsbergen, Belgium, Michaël Borremans paints figures in painterly rooms where something has just happened, or is about to. His subjects look away. Their hands are folded. The light is too clean. Critics reach for words like “stilled” and “suspended.”
His recent show The Colts at David Zwirner (2025) included small oil portraits whose faces were nearly erased, as if the sitter had stepped out of their own picture. Borremans rarely uses Instagram himself, but his gallery posts consistently. Bookmark @davidzwirner for first-looks.
GaHee Park
Born 1992 in South Korea, GaHee Park now lives and works in New York. Her small oil paintings put two figures in a frame and shift something – a shadow, a missing limb, a doubled face – that you only notice five seconds in. The result feels like a memory that won’t quite hold still.
Park is the most “Instagram-native” of this group: she posts work-in-progress reels that show her layering oil into the uncanny in real time. Follow @gahee.park. She is represented by Pangée Gallery.
Body and Desire: Surrealist Painters Exploring the Body, Gender and the Unconscious
Where the eerie group stages quiet unease, this group stages appetite. The body is the argument, often erotic, often painted with the fleshy weight of a baroque history painter dragged into the present.
Ambera Wellmann
Born 1982 in Newfoundland, Canada, and now based in Berlin, Ambera Wellmann makes paintings that feel like temple scenes. Flesh presses against flesh. Figures tangle with horses, snakes, classical columns. The surfaces are rubbed, scraped, and reworked like frescoes.
Wellmann’s 2024 Perrotin show Lamp Black gathered canvases that collapsed painting history – Ingres, Klimt, Cy Twombly – into scenes of queer desire. She is one of the most important younger painters working in surrealism today. Follow @amberawellmann and @perrotin.
Kati Heck
Born 1979 in Düsseldorf, Kati Heck lives in Antwerp. Her large-scale figurative paintings stage grotesque carnivals of German provincial life: businessmen with donkey heads, brides in feathered headdresses, drinkers mid-fall. The humor is German and dry. The drawing is genuinely virtuoso.
Her recent work tackles the carnivalesque as a way to talk about contemporary identity and migration. Heck is represented by Tim Van Laere Gallery in Antwerp. Follow @katiheckofficial.
Emily Mae Smith
Born 1979 in New York, Emily Mae Smith is the most overtly satirical painter in this group. Her signature character, a broom-headed figure she calls “The Broom,” swings through canvas breaking vases, mirrors, and art-historical tropes. The palette is saturated, almost advertising-bright; the references pile up: Magritte, Manet, Surrealist collage.
Smith’s 2025 Petzel show Swift Hammer read as a direct rebuke to centuries of women being denied the painter’s hammer. Follow @emilysmith.studio.
Playful and Strange: Surrealist Artists Using Humor and Pop Imagery
If the previous groups felt weighted, this group loosens the tie. These artists use humor, pop imagery, and absurdist juxtapositions to push surrealism into a brighter register. Think Magritte with a punchline.
Matthew Hansel
Born 1983 in New York, Matthew Hansel paints dense interior scenes where modernist furniture crowds around figures mid-collapse. A man lies on a glass table. A woman levitates a cushion. There are chickens. The colors are dusty pinks, lemon yellows, and olive – somewhere between Vuillard and a fever.
Hansel shows with Anton Kern Gallery and was featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. He posts process on @matthewhanselstudio.
Drew Dodge
Born 1989 in Minnesota, Drew Dodge is an emerging surrealist painter whose small oil panels make big claims. Picture a tube of lipstick as a totem, a single eye peering from a cave, a velvet curtain framing nothing. The influence is mixed: Hieronymus Bosch by way of Saturday morning cartoons.
Dodge is less gallery-represented than others on this list, which makes his Instagram account the best place to follow new releases. Find him at @drewdodge.studio.
Rae Klein
Born 1993 in Portland, Rae Klein works in oil pastel and paint to make images that feel like feminine mysticism edited through an early-2000s desktop computer. Her paintings are full of goddesses, candles, rabbits, and coded symbols – a personal mythology rendered in jewel tones.
Klein’s work bridges fine-art surrealism and the dreamy end of Pop Surrealism. She shows with Praz-Delavallade in Paris. Follow @rae.klein.
Political and Mythic: Surrealist Painters Carrying on Neo-Surrealism’s Narrative Tradition
This group works in the lineage of the Leipzig School and the wider neo-surrealist revival: large canvases, dense narratives, recognizable figures doing impossible things, often with a political undertow. Where classic Surrealist painting often refused narrative, these artists embrace it.
Neo Rauch
Born 1960 in Leipzig and trained at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Neo Rauch is the towering figure of contemporary narrative surrealism. His paintings are crowded with workers, athletes, classical ruins, mysterious pipes, and figures in suits. The narrative keeps slipping. You see a man handing a baby to a man handing a brick to a horse.
Rauch is represented by David Zwirner (New York) and Galerie Eigen+Art (Leipzig/Berlin). His 2024 Zwirner show Propaganda was his most political statement in a decade. Follow @davidzwirner and @eigenartberlin for new work.
Inka Essenhigh
Born 1979 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Inka Essenhigh paints sinuous, glossy figure scenes that move between art nouveau, comic books, and梦境 dreams. Her recent work has moved into bronze sculpture and tapestry, expanding her surrealist vocabulary beyond the canvas.
Essenhigh shows with Kasmin Gallery in New York and is widely collected internationally. Follow @inkaessenhigh.
Mary Reid Kelley
Born 1979 in Greenville, Delaware, Mary Reid Kelley makes black-and-white paintings, videos, and drawings where classical narratives – Ovid, Hieronymus Bosch, the Greek myths – are rewritten in rhyming couplets spoken by skeletons, clowns, and prostitutes. The humor is sharp, the references are deep, and the work reads like a feminist surrealist channeling the Brothers Quay.
Kelley is the artist on this list who most clearly extends Breton’s interest in automatic writing, but with a script. She is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co. Follow @maryreidkelley.
How to Follow These Modern Surrealist Artists (Instagram, Galleries, Fairs)
The phrase “artists to follow” is doing real work in the search query behind this list, so let’s make it practical. Here is how I keep up with the contemporary surrealist scene without burning out my feed.
Follow the artists directly: every artist named above has an Instagram handle listed with their profile. Most post new work monthly and process clips weekly.
Follow the galleries: the blue-chip galleries (@davidzwirner, @perrotin, @hauserwirth, @pacegallery, @whitecube, @petzelgallery, @antonkerngallery, @kasmingallery, @timvanlaeregallery) post every show the morning it opens. This is how you see work before it hits a magazine.
Subscribe to gallery email lists: not as fun as Instagram, but the fastest way to learn about new editions and fair previews.
Visit the fairs: Frieze London, Art Basel, Fiac Paris, and the Independent in New York all show contemporary surrealism at the highest level. A single afternoon at Art Basel’s Unlimited section is enough to recalibrate what “contemporary surrealism” can look like.
Read critically: Artforum, Frieze, and Artsy cover the major painters here within weeks of each show. Skim monthly.
See it in person: collectors consistently tell me the same thing – Instagram gives you the door, but the painting teaches you the room. Many of these artists are in MoMA, the Whitney, Tate, and Centre Pompidou collections, so museum visits help anchor what you see online.
If you want to collect rather than just follow, start with editions and small works from the emerging names (Drew Dodge, Rae Klein, GaHee Park) before graduating to larger canvases by established painters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are some modern-day surrealist artists?
Modern-day surrealist artists include Julie Curtiss, Michaël Borremans, Ambera Wellmann, Emily Mae Smith, Matthew Hansel, GaHee Park, Kati Heck, Drew Dodge, Rae Klein, Neo Rauch, Inka Essenhigh, and Mary Reid Kelley. They work across oil painting, photography, sculpture, and digital media to keep the Surrealist tradition alive in 2026.
Who are the top 5 surrealist painters today?
If you only follow five painters, choose Julie Curtiss (Anton Kern), Michaël Borremans (David Zwirner), Ambera Wellmann (Perrotin), Neo Rauch (David Zwirner, Galerie Eigen+Art), and Emily Mae Smith (Petzel). Together they cover figurative, baroque, narrative, and satirical modes of contemporary surrealism.
What is contemporary surrealist art?
Contemporary surrealist art is the continuation of the Surrealist movement – founded by André Breton in 1924 – through living artists working today. It uses dream logic, the uncanny, and symbolic imagery to explore the unconscious, while engaging themes like gender, identity, and technology with current materials and mediums.
How is contemporary surrealism different from classic Surrealism?
Classic Surrealism was the 1920s-30s movement anchored by Breton, Dalí, and Magritte, focused on automatism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Contemporary surrealism shares those roots but engages current themes – gender, technology, globalization – and uses updated tools like digital painting and Instagram. Pop Surrealism (Mark Ryden, Casey Weldon) is a related but more commercial, lowbrow offshoot.
Which artists should I follow on Instagram for surrealism?
Start with @juliecurtiss, @gahee.park, @amberawellmann, @emilysmith.studio, @matthewhanselstudio, @drewdodge.studio, @rae.klein, @inkaessenhigh, and @maryreidkelley. Also follow their galleries – @davidzwirner, @perrotin, @petzelgallery, @antonkerngallery, and @kasmingallery – for daily viewing.
Where should I start with surrealist art online?
Begin with the artists above, then add Artsy.net, Contemporary Art Issue, Surrealism Today, and Culturizm to your reading list. For sales and editions, browse David Zwirner, Perrotin, Hauser u0026amp; Wirth, and Pace Gallery online. For museum exposure, search the MoMA, Tate, and Whitney collections for Borremans, Curtiss, and Rauch.
Conclusion
The best modern surrealist artists to follow in 2026 are not hard to find once you know their names, their galleries, and the moods they work in. Pick three accounts from this list today – I suggest one eerie painter (Borremans or Park), one body-and-desire painter (Wellmann or Heck), and one playful painter (Hansel or Klein) – and let your feed get strange for a month. You will start noticing how these artists talk to each other, and how their references stretch back to Magritte while staying rooted in the now. Surrealism did not die with Dalí. It just moved into your feed.