The Intersection of Art and Spirituality: Spiritual Artists Today

Benjamin Kellogg, installation view, Murmur Gallery LA

Is there room for spiritual artist within contemporary art?

In an era dominated by conceptual frameworks, institutional critique, and market-driven practices, contemporary art has experienced a significant shift toward reintegrating the spiritual dimension. This resurgence isn't simply nostalgia for religious iconography, but rather a critical engagement with transcendence, consciousness, and metaphysical inquiry. The contemporary art world—often characterized by its secularism and theoretical density—has begun acknowledging artists whose practices explore liminal spaces between material reality and spiritual experience. This essay examines the evolution of spiritually-engaged art practices, their theoretical underpinnings, and their position within contemporary discourse. We'll analyze how today's artists navigate spiritual content without retreating into dogma, investigate the methodologies that inform their studio practices, and question how these works function in our post-digital, hyper-connected society. By examining these intersections, we can better understand how spiritual art operates as both critique and proposition within the broader contemporary art ecosystem.

Understanding the Concept of Spiritual Art

Spiritual art traverses the porous boundaries between phenomenological experience and metaphysical exploration. Rather than illustrating dogmatic precepts, contemporary practitioners working with spiritual content engage with embodied knowledge, non-ordinary states of consciousness, and alternative epistemologies. These artists deploy various formal strategies—from material investigations to performative rituals—creating works that resist easy categorization and linear interpretation. Symbolism functions not as static signifiers but as dynamic portals that activate multiple readings simultaneously. The contemporary spiritual in art often manifests through practices of deep attention, presence, and a questioning of anthropocentric worldviews. This approach creates work that operates beyond linguistic frameworks, inviting viewers into experiential encounters that challenge conventional modes of perception and knowledge production. By examining these practices across diverse cultural contexts, we witness how spiritual art facilitates critical dialogue about consciousness itself while offering points of connection across philosophical traditions.

Arnold Bocklin, the isle of the dead, 1883

The Evolution of Spiritual Art Through the Ages

The trajectory of spirituality in visual culture reveals fascinating shifts in how artists negotiate the ineffable. Early expressions—from paleolithic cave paintings to medieval devotional objects—served specific ritualistic functions within their communities. The Renaissance and Enlightenment periods saw increasingly formalized religious iconography codified through institutional power structures. The twentieth century marked a decisive turn with artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, and crucially, Hilma af Klint, who rejected representational approaches in favor of abstraction as a means to access spiritual dimensions. Af Klint's recent posthumous recognition—culminating in the Guggenheim's landmark 2018-2019 exhibition—represents a significant reassessment of modernism's spiritual underpinnings that had been systematically marginalized by formalist art historical narratives. Contemporary approaches have moved beyond both representational religiosity and pure abstraction toward more nuanced, research-based practices that integrate spiritual inquiry with social engagement, technological exploration, and institutional critique. This evolution reflects broader cultural shifts in how spirituality is understood and practiced outside traditional religious frameworks.

Hilma Af Klimt, Svanen (The Swan) No. 17, Group IX, Series SUW, 1914-1915

The Impact of Spirituality on a contemporary Artist's Creative Process

The methodologies employed by spiritually-engaged contemporary artists often challenge conventional studio practices. Many practitioners incorporate meditation, somatic awareness, and ritual elements directly into their working processes, dissolving boundaries between life practice and art production. These approaches privilege embodied knowledge and intuitive modalities alongside intellectual frameworks. Artists working in this vein frequently report altered states of awareness during creation—a form of flow state that transcends ego-driven decision-making. The Blue Hour Podcast with Alex Coma exemplifies platforms documenting these alternative methodologies, offering insights into how artists across disciplines develop their unique channels for accessing non-ordinary consciousness. These processes often involve durational elements, repetitive actions, or material investigations that facilitate perceptual shifts. The resulting works serve not merely as representations of spiritual concepts but as artifacts of transformative processes and invitations to similar experiences. This integration of process and outcome marks a significant departure from production-oriented approaches that dominate market-driven contemporary art. You can find our more by clicking here.

How Spirituality Influences Artistic Interpretation and Perception

The hermeneutics of spiritually-engaged art resist the binary of objective/subjective interpretation that dominates conventional art criticism. These works operate through what philosopher Jean-Luc Marion terms "saturated phenomena"—experiences that exceed conceptual frameworks and categorical understanding. The encounter with such art initiates perceptual shifts that challenge viewers' ontological assumptions, inviting a form of participatory meaning-making that transcends purely intellectual engagement. This approach disrupts the authority of institutional interpretive frameworks without abandoning critical rigor. By activating multiple interpretive modes simultaneously—sensory, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual—these works create polysemic experiences that cannot be reduced to singular readings. This multiplicity of meaning challenges both market-driven demands for legibility and academic demands for theoretical consistency. The viewer's embodied response becomes integral to the work's completion, creating a co-creative relationship that mirrors spiritual practices of presence and attention. This interpretive model offers alternatives to purely market-driven or academic approaches to contemporary art.

The Role of Spiritual Art in Today's Society

In our current sociopolitical landscape marked by ecological crisis, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation, spiritually-engaged art practices offer critical alternatives to dominant narratives of progress and consumption. These works frequently address contemporary issues through non-dualistic frameworks that challenge Cartesian separations between mind/body, human/nature, and self/other. By incorporating diverse cosmologies and epistemologies, spiritual art contributes to decolonizing visual culture beyond superficial representation. Such practices create spaces for contemplation and communal experience increasingly absent in our attention economy. The transformative potential of this work extends beyond individual aesthetic experience toward collective healing and social reimagining. Rather than retreating into escapism, the most compelling spiritual art directly engages with urgent contemporary questions while proposing alternative modes of being, knowing, and relating. This engagement demonstrates how spirituality in art can function as both critique of existing systems and proposition for new social possibilities.

Alex Coma, Binah, oil on canvas, 2023

Public Reception and Critiques of Spiritual Art in the Contemporary Scene

The institutional art world's relationship with spiritually-engaged practices remains complex and often contradictory. Major museums have recently reexamined previously marginalized spiritual artists—evidenced by exhibitions of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin—yet contemporary practitioners often face skepticism from critics conditioned by post-structuralist frameworks suspicious of transcendent claims. The market simultaneously commodifies and dismisses spiritual content, creating paradoxical valuations that often separate artists' intentions from institutional framings. Critical reception frequently oscillates between dismissive secularism that reduces spiritual content to biographical curiosity and uncritical celebration that negates conceptual rigor. This tension reveals deeper questions about value systems in contemporary art discourse: what constitutes legitimate knowledge, valid experience, and authentic practice? The most successful spiritual artists navigate these contradictions by maintaining critical awareness of how their work functions within various contexts—resisting both market exploitation and institutional neutralization while engaging audiences beyond conventional art spaces.

What Future Holds for Spiritual Art in the Contemporary World?

The trajectory of spiritually-engaged art practices suggests evolving intersections with emerging technologies, ecological awareness, and post-colonial dialogue. Artists are increasingly employing digital technologies not as mere tools but as means to investigate consciousness itself, creating immersive environments and interactive experiences that facilitate altered perceptual states. Simultaneously, growing recognition of indigenous cosmologies and non-Western spiritual traditions is expanding the conceptual frameworks available to artists beyond Eurocentric paradigms. The global climate crisis has catalyzed renewed interest in art practices that challenge anthropocentric worldviews and reposition humanity within broader ecological and cosmic systems. As institutional boundaries between art, science, technology, and spiritual practice become increasingly permeable, we can anticipate hybrid forms that resist easy categorization while addressing humanity's fundamental questions about consciousness, meaning, and interconnection. These developments suggest spiritually-engaged art will continue evolving not as a stylistic trend but as a critical methodology for investigating reality itself.

Nika Fontaine, Woumb of creation, mixed media on canvas, 2017

What power does spiritual art hold to heal the artists creating it and transform the minds of those who receive it?

The therapeutic dimension of spiritually-engaged art transcends individualistic notions of self-expression toward more holistic understandings of art as transformative practice. For practitioners, the creation process often functions as embodied research—a form of knowledge production that integrates somatic awareness, material investigation, and consciousness exploration. This approach offers alternatives to the pathologization of non-ordinary experience prevalent in Western culture. The neurological effects of meditative art practices have been increasingly documented, demonstrating potential for restructuring perception beyond temporary aesthetic experience. For viewers, engagement with such works can initiate what anthropologist Victor Turner termed "liminal experiences"—threshold states that temporarily suspend conventional reality structures and open possibilities for perceptual reorganization. These encounters create conditions for what philosopher Alva Noë describes as "enactive perception"—understanding that emerges through active engagement rather than passive reception. The transformative potential extends beyond personal healing toward collective reimagining of social relations and ontological frameworks, suggesting art's capacity to function as both diagnosis and treatment for cultural dissociation.

Conclusion

The reemergence of spirituality within contemporary art represents neither regression to pre-modern religiosity nor uncritical New Age aesthetics, but rather a sophisticated response to the limitations of purely materialist frameworks. These practices challenge false dichotomies between critical rigor and spiritual inquiry, demonstrating how contemporary art can simultaneously engage theoretical discourse and metaphysical exploration. As institutions gradually acknowledge these approaches, opportunities emerge for more nuanced understanding of how art functions beyond representation and decoration. The most compelling spiritually-engaged art operates at intersections—between embodied knowledge and conceptual framework, personal transformation and social critique, cultural specificity and universal experience. By embracing these intersections rather than resolving them, such practices offer vital alternatives to the cynicism and exhaustion that characterize much contemporary culture. As we navigate unprecedented planetary challenges, the capacity of spiritual art to reimagine relationships between consciousness, materiality, and collective existence becomes increasingly relevant to both artistic innovation and human flourishing.