Berlin's Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg will devote its winter programme to the darker afterlife of Surrealism, with an exhibition running from 18 December through 2 May 2027. Titled In the Shadow of Surrealism, the show brings H.R. Giger, Zdzislaw Beksinski, Michael Ruppert and David Lynch into the context of an established Surrealist collection, tracing how the historic avant-garde's imagery hardened into postwar visions of psychological tension, bodily corruption and industrial alienation.

Swiss artist H.R. Giger anchors the presentation with the biomechanical aesthetic that fused human anatomy with cold machinery and reached a mass audience through his designs for Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. His airbrushed dystopias are set against the late Polish painter Zdzislaw Beksinski, whose untitled, desolate oil-on-fibreboard landscapes channel what he called Fantastic Realism: skeletal architectures and post-apocalyptic decay rendered with a bleak, meticulous calm.

The lineup is completed by Michael Ruppert and the late American filmmaker David Lynch, whose mixed-media paintings, assemblages and distorted figurative studies mine European Surrealism and domestic dread. Lynch's tactile surfaces, encrusted with resin, tar and text, show how the Surrealist investigation of the unconscious evolved into something rawer and more bodily, a cinema of unease translated into objects that can be walked around and examined up close.

By placing visionary and cult figures inside an institutional Surrealist collection, the museum is making an argument about lineage rather than simply borrowing famous names. The show proposes that Surrealism did not end with its historical moment but mutated, surviving in nightmares, machines and domestic interiors, and that its most unsettling descendants are best understood alongside the movement that first gave the unconscious a visual language.