After a long era of irony and detachment, a quieter, more searching current is returning to contemporary art. A number of today’s artists are turning back toward the spiritual — myth, ritual, the sacred, and the mysteries of the inner life.
A Return to the Sacred
This is not religion in any narrow sense. It is a renewed openness to mystery — to the parts of human experience that resist explanation. In an age of screens and certainty, that openness feels like a kind of resistance.
The spiritual is not new territory for art — it is the territory modern art came from. Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911, argued that painting’s true subject was inner necessity, and the rediscovery of Hilma af Klint — whose visionary abstractions predate the movement’s official history — has forced a rewriting of where abstraction actually begins. What faded during decades of market-driven cool was not the impulse itself but permission to name it. Today’s emerging artists are taking that permission back.
The shift shows up less as doctrine than as method: symbols handled with sincerity, titles that read like confessions, imagery drawn from ancestry and dream rather than media culture. The work asks slower questions, and it rewards slower looking.
Many Forms of the Spiritual
Roti Martínez channels Nahuatl and Aztec reference — the deer, the jaguar deity — into instinctive abstraction. Aurora Kalos surrounds her figures with spirits and celestial imagery. Citlali Haro paints in a register of atonement and the unspoken, while Su Lin Casanova turns toward transformation and the obsidian mirror of the self.
Roti Martínez: Ancestral Symbol as Instinct
Martínez works from Mexico’s deep symbolic inheritance without treating it as an archive. Mázatl (acrylic, 50 x 40 cm) takes its name from the Nahuatl word for deer — a figure of awareness and emotional perception — while Tepeyollotl (60 x 50 cm) draws on the Aztec deity of mountains, echoes, and the jaguar: strength and resonance, the unseen force moving beneath the surface. In his hands these references are not illustration but instinct — symbols allowed to behave the way symbols actually do in the mind, loose and alive.
Aurora Kalos: Between Dream and Waking
Kalos paints women at the edge of dream and waking, portraits that move between the hyperreal and the surreal as spirits and animals surface around her subjects. Cassiopeia (oil, 60 x 60 cm) turns to celestial imagery, while Awakening — the painting featured at the top of this article, and one the artist names as central to her practice — treats the inner life as a real, populated place. Her “Non-Migratory Birds” series, which begins with Open Sky, extends that interiority toward migration and the search for home.
Citlali Haro and Su Lin Casanova: Naming the Inner Life
For Haro, the title carries as much weight as the image. Expiación — atonement — is characteristic: an emotionally charged abstraction (100 x 80 cm) in which the word gives the field its gravity. Casanova approaches the inner life as hard-won territory, naming resilience, identity, and transformation with disarming directness. El Espejo de Obsidiana (120 x 80 cm) reaches for one of Mesoamerica’s oldest spiritual instruments — the obsidian mirror, used for reflection and divination — and turns it toward the self.
JoCa: The Unfinished as Inner State
The spiritual can also live in what is left unresolved. In JoCa’s Dreamer series, the language of the unfinished — the non finito — turns inward, producing images that read less as portraits than as inner states caught mid-formation. The incompleteness is the point: it leaves room for the viewer’s own interiority to enter the work.
Why It Resonates Now
This work offers something rare: space to feel wonder. It reminds us that not everything needs to be explained to be true.
It also answers something specific in how people collect today. Younger collectors in particular tend to buy from feeling first — they want a work that holds meaning they can live with daily, not just a name that signals taste. A painting built around ritual, ancestry, or the inner life gives them exactly that: an object whose significance deepens rather than dates. We’ve written about this shift in The Rise of Emotional Collecting; spiritually grounded work may be its clearest expression.
There is a market logic here too, though it follows the emotion rather than leading it. Work rooted in a specific symbolic tradition — Nahuatl cosmology, the obsidian mirror, celestial myth — is harder to imitate and slower to date than work built on visual trends. When an artist’s spiritual vocabulary is authentically theirs, it compounds across a career instead of expiring with a style cycle.
Living With Work That Holds Meaning
Spiritually grounded work behaves differently at home than purely formal work. It tends to anchor a room rather than decorate it, and it rewards placement where you actually pause — facing a bed or a reading chair, or at the end of a hallway. These tend to be the works that resist becoming wallpaper; the symbolic charge keeps re-opening them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is spiritual art in contemporary painting?
Contemporary spiritual art engages myth, ritual, the sacred, or the inner life without necessarily being religious. It ranges from ancestral symbolism, like Roti Martínez’s Nahuatl references, to psychological interiority, like Aurora Kalos’s dream-state portraits. The common thread is sincerity toward mystery rather than irony.
Is spiritual or symbolic art a good choice for a first-time collector?
Often, yes. Works with symbolic depth tend to hold personal meaning long after the purchase, which is the strongest predictor that you will still love a piece years from now. Start with the tradition or imagery that already resonates with you, and buy the strongest work you can from an artist whose broader practice supports it.
How do I display artwork with spiritual themes at home?
Give it a wall where you naturally pause — facing a bed, a reading chair, or the end of a hallway — rather than high-traffic background space. These works reward repeated, unhurried viewing. Calm surroundings and good, indirect light let the symbolism carry the room.
Are the works mentioned in this article available to acquire?
Every linked work is an original available through Art of NOMA at the time of writing. Each artist’s collection page shows their currently available originals, and you can inquire directly from any product page.
The return of the sacred is less a trend than a recovery of something painting always knew how to do. Explore original paintings, discover all of our artists, and if a work here stays with you, begin with the Aurora Kalos collection and inquire directly from any work’s page.