What happens when a painting looks so realistic that you almost believe you could step into it, yet at the same time it feels like a dream?
That is one of the central questions of magical realism.
Magical realism is not a style in which the artist necessarily paints trolls, angels, or other supernatural beings. On the contrary, what is often characteristic is that everything looks recognizable and realistic. The strange element instead emerges through the situation, the light, the composition, the mood, or the way the elements are brought together.
An ordinary room can suddenly seem unfamiliar. A person can look completely natural, yet be in a situation that is difficult to explain. An object can be rendered with photographic precision, yet acquire a meaning that extends far beyond the concrete object itself.
It is precisely the tension between the recognizable and the enigmatic that makes magical realism so interesting.
A Concept with a Surprising History
The term magical realism was originally used in connection with visual art.
The German art critic and art historian Franz Roh introduced the term in 1925 in connection with a new tendency in European painting. He described an art that had returned to a precise and concrete representation of the world after the more subjective and emotionally charged visual language of Expressionism. Yet although the subjects were realistic, they could appear estranged, strange, or almost magical.
This is an important point, because the modern understanding of magical realism is often associated with literature, especially with Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier.
Literary magical realism, however, developed somewhat differently. In Carpentier’s work, the marvelous does not necessarily appear as something that violates the rules of reality. It can be part of the way people actually experience the world. His concept lo real maravilloso, the marvelous real, was formulated in connection with his 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World.
It is therefore important not to treat magical realism in visual art and literature as exactly the same concept. They share an idea of tension between reality and something that exceeds immediate reality, but their historical points of departure are different.
What Characterizes Magical Realism in Visual Art?
There is no single formula for magical realism. It is rather a way of creating a particular relationship between reality, perception, and meaning.
Typically, several of these characteristics can be found:
1. A Highly Precise Representation of Reality
Objects, people, buildings, textiles, and landscapes may be painted with great technical precision.
The realistic starting point is important. The viewer must be able to recognize the world.
But realism is not necessarily the goal in itself.
It functions as the foundation for something else.
2. Something Feels Wrong Without Being Obviously Supernatural
The magical element often lies not in the subject itself, but in the way the subject has been constructed.
A person may be standing in a room that should be completely ordinary, yet the situation feels unreal. A landscape may be rendered realistically, but seem unnaturally still. A person may look directly at the viewer, without us being able to understand what the situation actually means.
It is often this ambiguity that creates the magical effect.
3. Time and Place Can Feel Displaced
Magical realism can combine different layers of time.
Historical elements can be placed in a modern context. Contemporary people can appear in compositions that resemble old religious or historical paintings.
The result is a world in which past and present exist simultaneously.
4. Light Takes on a Special Significance
Light and darkness often play a decisive role.
Strong, concentrated light can make a person or an object appear almost otherworldly, while the surroundings disappear into darkness.
Here magical realism can meet the visual language of the Baroque. Caravaggio is an obvious example of an artist who was not a magical realist in the historical sense, but whose dramatic use of light and darkness later became an important reference for artists working with a realistic yet enigmatic visual world.
5. Objects Acquire a Meaning That Extends Beyond Themselves
A chair is not necessarily just a chair.
A photograph, a toy, a flower, a door, or a piece of clothing can function as a symbol or a narrative element.
This does not mean that there is one correct interpretation of the object. On the contrary, magical realism can create images in which the viewer has to continue working with the meaning.
6. The Image Tells a Story, but Does Not Explain It
This may be one of its most interesting characteristics.
A magical realist painting can feel like a moment taken from a larger story.
We are not necessarily told what happened before, or what will happen afterward.
We find ourselves in the middle of something.
This creates a particular form of visual suspense: Something has happened. Something is happening. But what?
How Do You Create Magical Realism?
Magical realism is therefore not about painting “magical things.”
An artist can paint an entirely ordinary person, an ordinary room, and ordinary objects and still create a magical realist image.
What matters is the relationship between the elements.
You might begin with a realistic subject and then ask a few questions:
What happens if I change the light?
What happens if I remove the background?
What happens if two things that do not normally belong together are placed in the same room?
What happens if the person does not react to what is happening around them?
What happens if I paint a modern situation using the visual language of the Renaissance or Baroque?
What happens if I leave something unexplained?
In this way, you can create a displacement between what the eye sees and what the brain expects.
It is precisely this displacement that can make a realistic image feel magical.
Magical Realism Is Not the Same as Surrealism
The two concepts are often confused, but the difference is significant.
Surrealism often seeks to break with rational reality. Dreams, the unconscious, and illogical combinations play a central role.
Magical realism, by contrast, often takes reality as its starting point.
The surrealist image might say:
This cannot happen.
The magical realist image says something more like:
This looks as though it could happen. So why does it feel so strange?
That is why a magical realist image can be far more unsettling than an image in which the supernatural is obvious.
When something is obviously impossible, we accept it as fantasy.
When something is almost real, we begin to doubt our own perception of reality.
Artists Associated with Magical Realism
Historically, magical realism in visual art is associated in particular with artists connected to Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, in Germany, including Otto Dix and George Grosz. Other examples include Grant Wood in the United States and Pyke Koch in the Netherlands.
The Dutch painter Carel Willink is a particularly clear example. He painted extremely realistic architecture, landscapes, and figures, but placed them in situations with a strange, often unsettling atmosphere. Willink himself described his art as imaginary realism.
In the United States, George Tooker is often associated with magical realism. His images are precisely executed, but his people inhabit claustrophobic, geometric spaces in which repetition, isolation, and estrangement create a reality that feels like a nightmare without becoming an actual fantasy world. The Smithsonian likewise emphasizes the precise architectural structures, human isolation, and existential themes in his art.
It is also worth noting that magical realism should not be understood as a closed art-historical school. Today, the term is used more broadly and can describe artists who combine realistic representation with a dreamlike, symbolic, or alienating dimension.
Georg Schrimpf: The Quiet and Precise Reality
Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938) is one of the artists closely connected to the origins of magical realism. In 1925, the German art historian Franz Roh published his book Nach-Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus, in which he described a new tendency in contemporary painting. Schrimpf was among the artists whose work could be understood within this new visual world.
Schrimpf’s paintings are precise and immediately recognizable, yet at the same time they possess a strange stillness and unfamiliarity. His figures often appear isolated, and the rooms and landscapes are rendered with a clarity that almost makes them more unreal than a fantasy landscape.
This is particularly clear in Kinderbildnis (Child Portrait) from 1925. A boy is depicted simply and matter-of-factly. There is nothing supernatural in the subject, and yet the painting is strikingly enigmatic. The precise rendering, calm composition, and serious presence of the figure create a distance from ordinary everyday life.
This is precisely the quality that is important for understanding magical realism: The strange does not have to be something that happens in the image. It can arise from the way reality is represented.
Georg Schrimpf, Kinderbildnis (Child Portrait), 1925. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Public Domain / CC0.
Thomas Kluge: Why Is His Art Called Magical Realism?
Thomas Kluge is a good Danish example, precisely because his paintings can at first glance look like pure realism.
He is known for almost photographic precision and for a technique that draws clear connections to art history, including the Renaissance and Baroque.
But if we see Kluge only as a realist, we overlook something essential.
What is interesting about his paintings is often that the precise depiction of people and objects forms part of a universe that is not simply concerned with reproducing reality.
Danish art institutions themselves have characterized his art as a form of magical realism. In connection with an exhibition of Kluge’s portraits of the royal family, for example, his art was described as “a form of magical realism.” The same description emphasizes that the razor-sharp depiction of people and objects forms part of a universe that challenges the viewer’s interpretation and contains something beyond immediate likeness.
The same can be seen in art-historical descriptions of his other works. In connection with the exhibition Thomas Kluge – Kunstens virkelighed, Nivaagaard’s Painting Collection described his paintings as photographically realistic, yet characterized by isolation, darkness, and enigmatic or unsettling situations. Here, his realism was directly described as magical realism.
It is therefore not primarily because Kluge paints something supernatural.
It is because reality in his paintings becomes more than a record of reality.
A person may be depicted with almost photographic accuracy, but the surroundings, light, symbols, and composition cause the image to open toward another meaning.
This is particularly evident in his use of dark backgrounds and concentrated light. The person emerges from the darkness as a concrete, physical presence, yet is simultaneously detached from an ordinary everyday situation.
The realistic thus becomes almost theatrical.
And it is precisely there that the magical dimension emerges.
Kluge and the Old Masters
An important part of Kluge’s art is his deliberate relationship with art history.
His paintings can recall old portraits and religious compositions, while the people depicted are modern individuals.
This combination of historical visual traditions and contemporary subjects helps create the particular displacement that makes his paintings interesting in relation to magical realism.
His portrait of the royal family is a good example. It is at once a contemporary portrait and a clear reference to the older tradition of monumental royal and family portraits. The result is not simply a record of a family, but an image of power, history, identity, and national narrative.
In the same way, his works with historical subjects have been analyzed as a form of “magical, symbolic realism,” in which past and present, reality and fantasy, exist within the same visual universe.
It is therefore more precise to say that Thomas Kluge has been characterized as a magical realist than to say that he necessarily chose the term as an artistic program of his own.
The label itself is not the most important thing.
What matters is whether the term helps us understand what is actually happening in the paintings.
And in Kluge’s case, it does.
Magical Realism as an Artistic Method
Magical realism can therefore also be understood as a method for examining reality.
The artist begins with something recognizable.
Then the relationship between the elements is altered.
Perhaps the light becomes unnaturally concentrated. Perhaps the room becomes too empty. Perhaps the person is positioned in a way that makes no psychological sense. Perhaps historical and contemporary elements are combined. Perhaps an ordinary object is given disproportionate significance.
And suddenly there is a feeling that the image knows more than it tells us.
That is one of the strongest qualities of magical realism.
It does not necessarily show another world. It makes us see our own world in another way.
That is also why magical realism remains relevant to artists today. It does not require us to abandon realism. On the contrary, a highly precise representation can be precisely the tool that makes it possible to create something mysterious.
The more real the image looks, the stronger the small displacement can become.
And perhaps that is precisely where the magic begins.
