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Hyman Bloom painted death as if there were still something alive inside it. Cadavers split open on autopsy tables, exposed organs, severed limbs and decomposing bodies appear throughout some of his most powerful paintings. But Bloom was not interested in simple horror. His corpses glow with reds, yellows, violets and strange pearly colors. Thick paint turns ruined flesh into something almost jewel-like.

Takato Yamamoto’s figures seem to exist somewhere between the living body and the decorated corpse.

They are impossibly pale and composed, surrounded by lilies, insects, exposed bones, curling plants and ornamental patterns. Nothing in these images is allowed to remain simply beautiful for long. Look closer and a flower becomes part of a wound, a delicate arrangement reveals a skull, or an elegant body begins to merge with something dead, animal or unnatural.

There is something unnerving about Unica Zürn’s drawings before you can really explain what you are looking at. Faces appear inside other faces. Eyes multiply across bodies that seem part human, part animal and part organism without a name. Fine lines gather into knots, scales, feathers and strange anatomical structures. The closer you look, the less stable the image becomes.

Some artists construct nightmares from recognizable symbols: skulls, demons, ruined landscapes or scenes of supernatural horror. Sibylle Ruppert created something less stable. In her drawings, the nightmare begins within the body itself. Human figures twist into animals, machines, insects and unidentifiable organic structures. Muscles appear stretched beyond their limits. Limbs multiply, merge and disappear. What first resembles an erotic embrace can become an act of violence, while an apparently monstrous form may reveal traces of vulnerability and beauty. Working primarily in charcoal, crayon, painting and collage, Ruppert developed a particularly intense form of dark surrealism. Her art occupies an uneasy...

Few artists have dissolved the boundary between image-making and occult practice as completely as Austin Osman Spare. His drawings were not simply illustrations of magical ideas. For Spare, the act of drawing could itself become a ritual—a method of reaching beneath ordinary consciousness and giving form to desires, spirits and hidden aspects of the self.