2025-10-02
Although last year we celebrated the 100th anniversary of surrealism, it is probably not just the celebratory mood that is behind its recent success on the art market.
According to a Sotheby's September record conducted by ArtTactic, the total value of all Magritte works sold at auction since 2018 has exceeded $1.2 billion, the average price for a painting by Romanian contemporary artist Adrian Ghenie is $2.2 million, and Ewa Juszkiewicz continues to break records – and not only on the Polish market.
You may feel inclined to point out – “okay, but the works of all these people are very different. Are they really part of the same trend?” This is a valid question, as many contemporary artists have been re-visioning surrealism, while at the same time drawing on its legacy.
Polish examples include Marek Sobczyk and his “Surrealism – Colonialism,” which focuses on non-European art as a source of surrealism, or Aleksandra Waliszewska, who opposes the interpretation of her paintings in terms of psychoanalytic themes, which are key elements of this movement.
"I am often described as a painter inspired by surrealism,” said the artist in her interview with "Zwierciadło." “Surrealism has somehow been forced into people's consciousness, and those who write about art like to lump everything together with it.”
However, the market has its own rules. Artists are sorted into categories for auction purposes, which is why terms such as “surrealism” now cover a wider range of works than André Breton would have assumed. Now, normally it refers to works that thematize a subjective perception of the world expressed through the language of deformation, dreams, and fantasy.
As Robert Zeller, author of "New Surrealism," noted in an interview with Puck, the essence of surrealism – both classical and contemporary – lies in its tendency to draw on earlier art, resulting in Freudian “uncanniness” (“das Unheimliche”), a quality that makes things that seem familiar at the same time evoke an indefinable fear in us.
Back to Sotheby's analysis: between 2018 and 2024, sales of art classified as classical surrealism (led by Magritte, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington) saw a significant upward trend (8.8% compound growth annually), while the value of the entire market fell by 1.6% annually. A clear increase was recorded in the market for Latin American surrealists – as much as 22.8%.
Although contemporary surrealist art generates lower profits, its market is growing rapidly, especially in the case of female artists. Particularly noteworthy are the results achieved by Ewa Juszkiewicz, who ranked fifth in the contemporary category.
And what about museums? Surrealism is also popular there. Last year, Warsaw hosted the exhibition “Surrealizm. Inne mity,” which presented not only the symptoms of surrealism in Poland since the interwar period, but also contemporary works more distantly drawing on its legacy. Among the exhibited were, for example, works by Dominika Olszowy and Jan Jakub Ziółkowski.
In Munich and Hamburg, at the turn of 2024 and 2025, exhibitions revisiting this movement opened as well, with the Munich exhibition “Aber hier leben? Nein danke” looked back at the surrealists' tendency towards antifascism, while the Hamburg exhibition “Rendezvous der Träume,” attempted to explore its connection with German Romanticism.
Meanwhile, Tate Britain is currently hosting a monographic exhibition dedicated to Ithell Colquhoun, a member of the British Surrealist Group in the 1930s and 1940s.
Although trends in the art world depend largely on private institutions, some researchers are attempting to interpret them.
The return to surrealism, a movement that flourished in the interwar period, is understood, for example, as a response to social problems such as wars and fear of technology.
The interest in surrealism, not only on the market but also on a broader scale in cultural institutions, may also be linked to a sense of exhaustion with abstract art, which – though not always – fails to adequately comment on reality, both individually and politically.