Contemporary Artists Are Going to Hell to Capture the Modern World

For centuries, the bizarre creatures featured in the three panels of Hieronymus Bosch’s magnum opus, The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1504), have enchanted other artists. Fellow Netherlander Pieter Bruegel the Elder pulled heavy inspiration from Bosch’s crowded compositions for his industrious tableaus. Bosch also inspired the Surrealists, from Salvador Dalí to Leonora Carrington. Even now, contemporary painters continue Bosch’s spirit, centering devious, demented beings in their artworks.

According to Joseph Leo Koerner, author of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016), Bosch’s odd creatures were depictions of biblical evils. The wacky birds, the headless scorpions, and the man-eating dogs are “enemy presence,” or the devil’s peons encouraging bad behavior in the real-world. Humanity’s worst impulses were represented in the fantastical bacchanale style, but every creature was a stand-in for a human committing a biblical sin, like gluttony, masturbation, or rage.

Today, the darkness Bosch observed continues to dominate society’s psyche, but artists are depicting different terrors. In the pandemic, people read about death every day, experienced severe isolation, and developed cabin fever from lockdown. Reports showed that 2020 was laden with increased crime, mental health crises, and harassment, especially for essential workers. Several years on, these themes still reverberate throughout artists’ works. In particular, Frieze L.A. and Felix art fairs were laden with infernal scenes this year, a sign of how deeply the pandemic impacted our vision of the world, and still continues to.

One such artist was New York City oil painter, HYDEON, who cites Bosch and Bruegel as major influences. He noticed depraved behaviors escalating during the pandemic, which continue to influence his paintings five years later. He still remembers taking walks around the city in the early days of lockdown, witnessing aggression on the streets, an uptick in homelessness, and even a car on fire, which became a recurring motif in his work.

“Those things get integrated into my paintings, and then I just depict them in crazy, otherworldly ways that are so far off from the original thing that happened to me,” HYDEON, who is represented by Ricco/Maresca Gallery and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, explained. “I like to make them whimsical.”

His paintings feel like screenshots from a time-bending video game where civil war soldiers battle cyborgs. Red demons frequently invade the compositions, as seen in his paintings The Villa (2025) and Triumph of the Willing Pt. I (2023). The horned creatures stand on their hind legs, extend their trident-like claws, and breathe fire. HYDEON has a whole backstory for these fiends. They’re cave-dwelling hermits: half alien, half human. They get high off mysterious minerals and use those hallucinations to open portals to reach the modern world, seeking even more ores for their addiction, he explained. While, at first glance, they seem unrelated to anything in the real world, HYDEON uses the demons as stand-ins for human behavior, just like Bosch.

“They represent opposition in your life. Everybody has demons. No matter how good your life is, there’s always going to be the monster mind,” HYDEON said.

Fellow New Yorker Maggie Ellis, represented by Charles Moffett, also began incorporating demons into her frenetic paintings during the pandemic. She recalls seeing stressed out faces as passersby doomscrolled on their phones. The emotions stuck with her, and today, she unleashes all the gloomy energy she absorbed through her paintings.

In addition to Bosch, she cites El Greco’s Bartholomew the Apostle (1610–14) as a major influence. In the lower left-hand corner of the late Renaissance painting, a demon lurks behind St. Bartholomew. The pointy-eared creature with wispy hairs seems to bear a childlike expression and a sinister half-smile, even though the apostle holds a metal chain that’s wrapped around its neck, keeping it in check.

In Ellis’s painting Purgatory Beach (2024), a similar demon with a blank stare takes center stage, poised on all fours, arching its back like a cat. A nude woman bends over him backwards, one hand bent oddly in the wrong direction, as if she’s been violently knocked into an uncanny, disjointed pose.

“I feel like there are characters in that painting, their intentions are not exactly good,” Ellis said.

Elsewhere in her works, demons keep the parties going. In Inferno (2024), a hellish crowd parties around a pillar of fire, while a demon DJs a set for the end of days. In Belle Reve (2025) ghostly apparitions haunt vampiric lounge bar diners. The creatures in both works encourage an atmosphere of self-indulgence and abandoned inhibitions. And, as some humans did in the pandemic, the demons are beginning to turn on each other. Ellis says she’s now working on a body of work where the demons are fighting, inspired by pent up rage and frustration felt during the pandemic. Today, she said, there is an additional layer of darkness she feels whenever she checks political news.

Embattled evil also appears in Tokyo-based painter Asami Shoji’s work. The Japanese painter, who was included in Linseed Projects’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles, often depicts large, red apparitions with bones and horns, or dark humanoid forms that beckon wailing figures into their bodies. Though figures in 24.12.29 (2024) and 24.1.20 (2024) are unmistakably demonic, Shoji doesn’t view them as demons. They often read as gentle creatures, with soft beady eyes and a serene pose.

“This world is full of contradictions—different values and meanings can exist at the same time,” Shoji wrote over email. “I think I’m painting beings in a state of evil—entities that might still transform into something good, or into something else entirely.”

Shoji sees the world as a place that has potential to heal. Sin is only a temporary state, and anyone can choose to change their moral course. Five years out from the pandemic, the darkness that wiggled into HYDEON, Ellis, and Shoji’s subconsciousness may be subsiding. In America, crime is back to pre-pandemic rates, unemployment fell, and most people surveyed by the Pew Research Center feel that they have recovered.