Surrealism has always promised one thing: proof that gravity, scale, and cause and effect were never actually mandatory. Since Dalí first melted a clock across a desert, artists have kept finding new ways to make the impossible look like a photograph.

We’ve spent seventeen years chasing that feeling: in-camera illusions, paintings where the floor becomes the ceiling, sculpture split into a dozen selves, a face dissolving into a forest. No two artists get there the same way. That’s the point.

Here are eight of the best examples we’ve found.

1. Erik Johansson

A woman in a red coat stands in a misty forest, holding multiple shopping bags and a smartphone, next to a glowing escalator surrounded by tall trees.

Erik Johansson doesn’t touch a pixel that didn’t start as a real photograph, which is what makes it unsettling. Roads curl into the sky. Lakes peel back like wallpaper. An escalator rises out of a misty forest toward nothing. Every scene is built from dozens of ordinary shots, stitched until the seams disappear. No AI at use.

Read the full feature: The Surreal Worlds of Erik Johansson →

2. Sylvain Viau

A blue car appears to be levitating above a concrete surface with a beach and cloudy sky in the background.

Sylvain Viau took the flying car promise nobody kept and applied it to cars nobody expected: a 1990s Peugeot, an old Citroën, even a fire truck, each relieved of its tires and left hovering above the pavement. Deadpan, not dazzling. That’s why it works.

Read the full feature: Surreal French Hovercars by Sylvain Viau →

3. Cinta Vidal

An artistic depiction of an upside-down room with two figures: one lounging on a green couch and the other lying on a patterned rug. Large windows reveal an abstract cityscape outside. — “Attic” (2025), acrylic on wood

In a Cinta Vidal painting, gravity is optional and nobody in the room has noticed. A child plays piano near the ceiling while a dog naps on the floor below. A family reads in a room stacked sideways against another room entirely. She calls them “un-gravity constructions.”

Read the full feature: Captivating Paintings by Cinta Vidal Explore Time and Space →

4. Kathrin Federer

Black-and-white composite landscape of layered misty mountain ridges with tiny solitary trees perched on distant peaks, evoking a vast, dreamlike stillness.

Kathrin Federer works almost entirely in black and white, so the rare touch of color hits like a struck match. Her composites stack figures and landscapes into towering, impossible scale, but the mood stays hushed: less a shout than a held breath.

Read the full feature: Kathrin Federer’s Fascinating Black and White Surrealism →

5. Yoshitoshi Kanemaki

A stylized sculpture of a figure with multiple faces, dressed in a denim jacket and a pastel sweater, standing on a wooden base, conveying themes of identity and perception. — “Breathing Caprice A,” paint on Torreya

Yoshitoshi Kanemaki carves a single figure from one block of wood, then splits the face into shifting, refracted layers, like watching someone through broken glass. It’s the only sculpture on this list, and it earns the spot.

Read the full feature: Fragmented Faces by Yoshitoshi Kanemaki →

6. Christoffer Relander

Christoffer Relander’s We Are Nature series is old-fashioned double exposure, done right. A face dissolves into a canopy of leaves. A hand emerges from beneath a bloom. A child’s profile fills with frost-covered grass under a full moon. The technique is a century old. The effect never gets old.

Read the full feature: Christoffer Relander’s Dreamy Double Exposure Photography →

7. Anxo Vizcaíno

A pale, featureless human silhouette walks up a staircase suspended in starry space, flanked by two massive planet-like spheres, in a stark black-and-white illustration.

Anxo Vizcaíno’s The Observatory series drops a single, faceless figure into a black-and-white cosmos of stairways, planets, and impossible scale. There’s no story explaining how they got there or where they’re going. That silence is the whole point.

Read the full feature: A Place Between Dimensions, by Anxo Vizcaíno →

8. Kacper H. Kiec

Surreal collage portrait of a figure in a red hood, thin white lines radiating outward from the head like a starburst, dotted with small red and white circles against a dark, snow-flecked background.

Kacper H. Kiec builds his surrealism out of paper as much as pixels: photography, paint, and collage layered until the seams become part of the texture. You can see exactly how it was made, and that’s what makes it strange.

Read the full feature: Surreal Collage Worlds by Kacper H. Kiec →

Eight artists, eight different ways of asking the same question: what if the rules didn’t apply here? We’ll keep adding to this collection as we find more.