As museums and biennials revisit Surrealism, outsider practices and Indigenous cosmologies, a pattern emerges that suggests a renewed turn toward spirituality, mysticism and alternative knowledge systems as tools for meaning-making in a moment of political, technological and ecological crisis. Courtesy Archivio Chiara Fumai

Riding the continued momentum of 2022’s The Milk of Dreams and the movement’s 100th anniversary in 2024, Surrealism—and particularly its long-neglected female visionary lineage—continues to gain traction through auction records and major international exhibitions. But this renewed focus on Surrealism and surrealists is not merely a matter of canon recalibration or market-driven revival. What is unfolding appears to exceed the constraints of the “surrealist” label altogether, which is too narrow, perhaps, to contain the breadth of what’s emerging. Rather than a passing aesthetic trend, this is a broader cultural shift that engages not only with the irrational but also with the symbolic, the psychic and the visionary as frameworks for both artistic practice and historical reinterpretation.

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Seen alongside the parallel revaluation of Indigenous practices—most visibly foregrounded by Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere—and the slower but increasingly visible resurgence of outsider art, there is a clear renewed interest in and rediscovery of spirituality and alternative forms of knowledge involving magic and mysticism. One recent exhibition in Milan, organized by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum and Marta Papini, offered a particularly thought-provoking cross-historical curatorial framework for considering what is becoming a broader shift in how curators are interpreting and framing recent art history.

“Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible” brought together the work of more than 70 figures—from writers and philosophers to mediums, mystics and clairvoyants—in a show that unfolded within the spiritually charged setting of Palazzo Morando, once home to Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, a figure at the margins of European spiritual modernism whose life blended aristocratic privilege with esoteric pursuit.

The exhibition placed overlooked historical visionaries in dialogue with contemporary artists through practices shaped by mediumship, ecstatic states and imaginative automatism—not to affirm supernatural claims but to retrace how belief systems outside dominant rationalist narratives have historically expanded definitions of art and belief while quietly reshaping social, gender and political imaginaries. Here, the surreal, the mystical and the magical emerge not as escapism but as a silent revolution of the imagination—one that feels acutely resonant with the shared needs of our turbulent present, and with what many contemporary artists are already attempting today, when read through these lenses.

What emerges is a shared symbolic lexicon and narrative framework that seeks to reactivate art’s most ancestral, primordial ritual function—using it both as a portal and a metaphorical code to access non-material realms of consciousness: dimensions invisible to ordinary perception but reachable through altered states of mind. For these artists, past and present, art becomes a tool for recovering meaning before and beyond the ideological and extractive logics imposed by late capitalism, reopening access to a deeper spiritual essence long obscured by both instrumental rationalism and the incessant noise of mass media and social media spectacle.

Most importantly, this kind of transhistorical journey reveals how different periods of crisis have historically produced similar and recurring revivals of esoteric and metaphysical thinking—largely because existing explanatory systems cease to feel adequate. When political, economic and ecological frameworks lose credibility, the promise of linear progress—along with official canons........

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