Forget haunted houses—this Halloween, the ghosts are in the galleries. This fall, a couple of standout exhibitions are gathering artworks celebrating the ghost in many forms. At Kunstmuseum Basel, “Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural” traces centuries of spectral imagery, from Romantic séances to digital afterlives, through March 8, 2026. Meanwhile, the Tacoma Art Museum’s current exhibition, “Haunted,” brings together moving image works, installation, sculpture, and photography to examine how art can make the unseen visible. Both exhibitions ask, what happens when the past refuses to stay hidden?
Ghosts have haunted art for centuries. In the Renaissance era, they drifted through depictions of the Resurrection and divine visions. By the 19th century, artists like Francisco Goya and Henry Fuseli were giving these apparitions a psychological form. Goya’s etchings imagined specters of war and conscience, while Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) visualized the terror of unseen forces pressing on the mind.
The Nightmare, 1781
Henry Fuseli
Art History 101
In the 20th century, the haunting turned inward. Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington treated ghosts as symbols of desire and dislocation, while post-war artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg layered traces and erasures into their canvases like visual revenants. Later on, Louise Bourgeois’s suspended figures and Félix González-Torres’s glowing light strings transformed absence and loss itself into presence. In their work, haunting was not just a subject but a condition. For artists, ghosts endure as a metaphor for memory, longing, and what refuses to disappear.
Now, a new generation of artists is reanimating the form, summoning spirits through their work. Here are nine of them.
B. 1983 Huainan, China. Lives and works in Paris.
Désarroi I, 2025
Xie Lei
Sies + Höke
Premonition I, 2025
Xie Lei
Sies + Höke
Phantom figures drift through Xie Lei’s monochromatic paintings, formed through layered oil paint that he alternately builds up and erases. These haunting, ambiguous scenes stem from Lei’s fascination with the thresholds of human experience. “The subject matter that I deal with has an eternal quality to it,” he said to ShadowPlay Magazine. “I talk about life, love, and death. What interests me the most is their ambiguity, how to present something difficult or almost impossible to express.”
Working in a restrained palette of greens and blues, the Paris-based artist scrapes, wipes, and abrades the surface of his works to create his luminous, ghostly bodies that hover between presence and dissolution. Whether floating in a verdant abyss, as in Désarroi I (2025), or emerging faintly from darkness, as in Premonition I (2025), his figures seem to materialize and fade in the same breath. Each painting feels like a séance in which Lei summons spectral figures.
Xie presented two solo exhibitions this year, “Mort heureuse” at Paris’s Semiose in January and “Désarroi” at Düsseldorf’s Sies + Höke in September. He was the subject of a solo show at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2023–24.
B. 1991, Tallinn, Estonia. Lives and works in London.
Giving something I don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it, 2025
Mariann Metsis
Margot Samel
Mariann Metsis turns mourning into theater. Inspired by the Trauerspiel—the Baroque “mourning play” where tragedy is made into a performance—the Estonian artist stages grief in hazy, grayscale compositions.
Metsis often paints spectral figures that drift through eerie scenes where faces and bodies blur into shadow. Giving something I don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it (2025), for instance, features a ghostly figure against a green chalkboard with nonsensical scribbles scrawled across it. In Isabelle (2025), the artist paints a close-up of a woman’s face, where the contours fade away into the purplish-grey backdrop.
Metsis presented these paintings in a solo show in New York earlier this year with Margot Samel, “Trauerspiele,” titled after the mourning plays. The artist has been the subject of solo shows at Deborah Schamoni in Munich and Galerina in London.
B. 1989, Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lives and works in Berlin and Oslo.
Unfold and Repair, 2024
Sandra Mujinga
Richard Gray Gallery
Touch-Face 3, 2018
Sandra Mujinga
Croy Nielsen
When Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga first saw the holographic concert projections of Whitney Houston and Tupac, she began thinking about how technology can outlive the body, particularly in the way it allows us to persist beyond death. That idea led to Flo (2019), an artwork consisting of a towering holographic figure created for the Museum of Modern Art. These “digital ghosts,” as Mujinga described them in an interview with the museum, explore “the contradictions of being hyper-visible and invisible at the same time,” which are experienced by many Black people.
Mujinga channels this idea through all of her sculpture and installation work, though ghosts appear most directly in her humanoid sculptures. Unfold and Repair (2024), for instance, features four of these haunting human forms, constructed from steel draped in blue sheets. “I was thinking about how the Black body has been seen as threatening, and how this can cause real danger to it,” she continued. Mujinga is currently showing 55 of these sentinels in “Skin to Skin” at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum—one of Artsy’s must-see museum shows, on view through January 11, 2026.
Living between Berlin and Oslo, Mujinga has shown work at the 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as at leading institutions like the New Museum and the Swiss Institute in New York.
B. 1951, Tsu, Japan. Lives and works in Cologne and Berlin.
Lago Rondo, 2020
Leiko Ikemura
Lisson Gallery
Mother Fisher, 2023
Leiko Ikemura
Lisson Gallery
Feminine spirits roam vaporous, dreamy landscapes in Leiko Ikemura’s paintings. These ghostly adolescent girls often appear somewhere between sleep and death, evoking a stillness shaped by loss. For the artist, this is linked to the national mourning after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. “Death is our fate, and we are confronted with the loss of relatives and friends….the grief is collective, so I needed to visualise how I could express that without being too sentimental,” Ikemura told Studio International. “Sometimes these tragic events happen, and we have to deal with them, and it is not easy. Especially as an artist, what can you do?”
Spirits appear throughout the Japanese German artist’s practice. In her tempera and oil painting on jute, Girl with a Baby in Dark Red (2018), Ikemura depicts two faceless women enveloped in a soul-stirring red glow, evocative of liminal spirits between life and death. Ikemura features these spectral bodies in her sculpture practice as well. Memento Mori (2020–22), a galvanized bronze sculpture of a girl lying on the floor, lingers between death and life, as if caught mid-passage as a ghost.
Ikemura, now 74, joined the Lisson Gallery roster in August 2024. The gallery staged a solo exhibition for the artist in New York, “Talk to the sky, seeking light,” earlier this year. Her solo institutional exhibitions have been held at South Korea’s HEREDIUM in 2024 and Berlin’s Georg Kolbe Museum in 2023.
B. 1989, Barcelona. Lives and works in Barcelona.
Mil noches, 2025
Jose Bonell
PEANA
Ghosts haunt the domestic interiors in Jose Bonell’s somber paintings. Baile de sombras (2025), for instance, shows three squiggly humanoid forms floating above a drowsy figure in pajamas. The Spanish artist’s paintings create a contrast between these familiar spaces and the phantoms and shadowy figures that populate them.
The paintings comprising his current solo show with PEANA, “He soñado tanto que ya no soy de aquí,” feature the same ghost figure in different situations. In Playground (2025), the figure is pushing a pillow on a swingset, while in Mil noches (2025), it lies creepily as a silhouette on a bed. These paranormal scenes show everyday life inhabited by a listlessly drifting ghost, roaming without purpose yet unable to let go of the world it once knew.
Bonell has presented solo shows with Semiose in Paris and Various Small Fires in Los Angeles. His work has been featured in group shows with The Hole in New York and PM/AM in London, among others.
B. 1992, Bergen, Norway. Lives and works in Cape Town and Bergen.
Wet Feet , 2025
Oda Tungodden
99 Loop Gallery
Oda Tungodden’s Ghost Memories (2021) makes its title literal: It’s a spectral painting in which three blue silhouettes appear to drift out of their own bodies. Many of the Norwegian artist’s paintings portray everyday scenes rendered in luminous palettes; her figures glow as if suspended between worlds.
In many cases, Tungodden’s figures are translucent. In Wet Feet (2025), two boys sit side by side, but their outlines blur and dissolve into the painting’s gold and blue backdrop. Occasionally, Tungodden uses a smudging technique evocative of a phantasmic presence. For instance, page 24 (2022) features two smudged-out bodies on a swingset.
Tungodden has presented six solo shows with Cape Town’s 99 Loop Gallery, most recently “Shape Shifter” in February 2025. She completed a Master’s in fine art from the University of Bergen in 2023.
B. 1988, Bojnord, Iran. Lives and works in Tehran.
Series of Ghosts Wandering, 2021
Morteza Khosravi
Leila Heller Gallery
Morteza Khosravi’s layered portraits mine Iran’s post-revolutionary history, often painted over archival imagery so that erasure itself becomes a presence. Khosravi’s “Series of Ghost Wandering” reimagines familial scenes, where groups of ghostly figures gather in sepia or greyscale landscapes. These ink-on-cardboard works reflect his Iranian heritage: portraying ghosts probes what was lost during a time of societal and cultural upheaval in his homeland.
One work, Series of Ghosts Wandering (2021), shows a group of people at a picnic, all fading away, as if mere spirits in the scene. Meanwhile, another series, “Series of Memorial Photos,” takes a more uncanny, sorrowful approach, framing the figures as lost loved ones. One, Series of Memorial Photos (2022), shows a child’s birthday party with kids circled around a table; each of the faces looks solemnly into the camera. The specific contours of the image itself are faded away, creating a nostalgic blur that nods to lost histories. These works are featured in a solo show at Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai, “The Floating Table,” on view through November 5th.
B. 1981, Baghdad, Iraq. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ghost Fires Through Eyes, 2025
Hayv Kahraman
Jack Shainman Gallery
Anqa', 2025
Hayv Kahraman
Jack Shainman Gallery
When a wildfire tore through Hayv Kahraman’s Los Angeles home, the artist returned to find the air thick with toxins and the mountainside scorched. In the ruins of her Altadena house, she searched for a copy of Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, where the writer and painter noted, “Because the sun is dangerous, it can kill you—burn you. But the sun is also life.” Kahraman focused on that paradox between life and death in a recent solo exhibition with Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, “Ghost Fires.”
Kahraman, who fled Baghdad with her family during the Gulf War, draws parallels between the fires of war and climate disaster in her paintings, reflecting on how fire inserts itself into every stage of her life. In “Ghost Fires,” her figures appear possessed, overtaken by the smoke that pervades these traumatic incidents. In Ghost Fires Through Eyes (2025), three women are marked by clouded eyes, and one appears to be seized by a curling plume of smoke that wraps around her like a spell. These scenes don’t depict ghosts in the traditional sense, but instead show people living with a memory that refuses to pass on.
“Ghost Fires” marks her fifth solo exhibition with Jack Shainman Gallery, following major presentations at the ICA Boston, The Broad, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
B. 1992, Denmark. Lives and works in Copenhagen.
Children of the sun, 2024
Oliver Bak
Sprüth Magers
Oliver Bak once told Ocula that he was “trying to expose the ghost inside paintings.” Each of the artist’s dreamlike, monochromatic fields is populated by figures that appear more like ghostly impressions than figures. In this fleeting world (2024), for instance, depicts a severed head lying without expression in a dark field in front of wilting flowers. To create these works, Bak reworks a single canvas several times, layering paintings on top of earlier efforts as if they’re haunted by the remnants of past images shimmering beneath the surface.
Children of the sun (2024), a textured oil-and-wax painting, features a kneeling, silhouetted figure beneath four gray flower petals. But when you look closer at the canvas, a second kneeling figure appears in the upper right section of the painting. Its faded figure resembles a shadow of the original, haunting the lush environment. Similarly, Violets Banquet (2024) presents a purple field, speckled with floral forms; however, another of Bak’s phantoms rests in the right corner, a sort of jumpscare emerging from a thick painting.
Bak was named one of Artsy’s breakout artists of 2024. His solo exhibitions have been staged by Sprüth Magers in Berlin, Cassius & Co in London, and ADZ in Lisbon.
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