From Chaos to Catharsis: The Most Unexpected Depictions of Mental Health in Art
May 19, 2025
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
Looking closely at the most significant milestones in an artist’s career reveals a fascinating picture: one that is often erratic, messy, and contradictory. Hidden thoughts and unspoken feelings take shape, becoming visible forms, until they evolve into icons. These images, though deeply personal and unique, live in the tension between being widely recognisable and deeply intimate at the same time.
One of the most powerful roles of art - and artists - is to remind us that no human being is truly alone. The internal struggles we assume are ours to carry in solitude are, in reality, more widely shared than we tend to believe. That’s why certain artworks dealing with mental health themes have become so emblematic: they shape culture by remembering that human beings deal with the same hardships everywhere in the world, even coming from different backgrounds and having had diverging experiences.
What might seem illegible or incoherent in other contexts is given room to breathe in the context of art. Remaining true to their anxieties and concerns, artists create works that act as both mirrors and conduits, allowing viewers to recognise their unspoken narratives in someone else’s fractured visual language.
This is especially relevant today, as discussions around mental health often risk becoming aestheticised or sanitised. Art, instead, insists on oneness, imperfection, smudges, extreme feelings, and sensations impossible to explain in words. It accommodates recurring trauma, obsessive gestures, irrational behaviour, and dissociative states, without demanding clarity or resolution. In this way, artists who explore the emotional unconscious do not simply didactically “showcase” the fragile theme of mental health: they present visions that complicate (and therefore, enrich) our understanding of it. To celebrate how these complex human experiences have been portrayed in art across time, here is a selection of 6 contemporary artists who challenged mental health depictions – from legendary artists to emergent ones to keep on the watch.
Bas Jan Ader
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader is one of the first artists to come to mind when thinking about individuals who dedicated their lives to depicting depressive states. Known for his vulnerable performances, Ader explored themes of loss and human fragility, with the video-postcard I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971) being his signature work. In the film, Ader weeps relentlessly, refusing to give the spectator a coherent explanation for his desperation. For the viewer, Ader’s tearful face becomes a mirror: an exercise in empathy that requires no additional information. Sadness - Ader’s, but human sadness in general - becomes a subject that can be framed in time and space. It’s no coincidence that Ader’s artistic career concluded with one of history's most bittersweet, delicate, and striking finales: a solo boat journey from which the artist never returned.
Tracey Emin
Emin’s My Bed (1998) remains one of the most brutally intimate installations of the late 20th century. Stained sheets, cigarettes, discarded underwear, and empty vodka bottles turn the bed, a private space of rest and vulnerability, into a stage of emotional ruin. All of Emin’s work is dedicated to the multiple ways she endured trauma from her childhood years: whether it’s assemblage installations or text-based art. “Welcome always, whatever mood, no matter how tired. I love you” she writes in one of her drawings, as if wanting to embody a boundless affection for humanity and the fragility of others, regardless of any judgment.
Jasper Spicero
Jasper Spicero’s films, sculptures, and installations explore the emotional weight of sterile, institutional spaces. His cool-toned, industrial settings blend elements from hospitals, childhood bedrooms, and corporate offices that evoke memories of clinics and mental health sites, places tied to both comfort and trauma. Spicero uses this mix of childlike and clinical aesthetics to reflect on how inhabiting these places shapes emotional experience. From his film Centers in Pain (2014), shot in an abandoned prison, to The Glady Day (2018), his work suggests that the same visual language used to calm or control us, whether in hospitals or therapy centres, also hides deeper feelings of vulnerability and unease.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is the installation that best captures the feeling of disorientation caused by the rise of technology between the 20th and 21st centuries, while also serving as a powerful depiction of self-alienation. In a narrow hallway, two monitors play live feeds of the viewer from behind, while the other depicts the same hallway from the same angle, but empty. By giving the spectator an uncatchable image of themselves, so familiar yet not unrecognisable, the work mimics symptoms of paranoia, dissociation, and existential dislocation. It’s an early, haunting prototype of how contemporary technologies mediate the self through distance.
Zein MajaliMajali’s multimedia practice unfolds in visual/sound performances reflecting on the social media posts of the 21st century, and the contemporary obsession with beauty standards in the current age. Mixing images from TikTok, weird beauty challenges, exaggerated skin care rituals and plastic surgery, she describes the fragmented self in the era of social media, creating artworks with what we see every day on our FY page. In her new work The New New Face of You (2025), commissioned by Global Art Forum (Dubai), and in her live performance at Somerset House INTIHAK انتهاك (VIOLATION) (2024), she juxtaposes images from the internet with rendered animations of body modifications, flirting with the chaos of self-perception in the digital age and the genre of body horror.
Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers creates immersive installations that explore grief, adolescence, and unresolved trauma, often through the lens of youth culture and mourning. In Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016), she uses a childhood symbol (a character from the children's show Clone High) to confront the lasting impact of the Columbine High School massacre: an event that deeply affected her childhood as a traumatic event, both in personal and collective memory. Rogers’ work often depicts how fictional worlds can be like a haven, offering a way to process and find shelter from pain. Her work is about narrating personal stories with pop culture symbols, presenting suspended spaces where trauma is mythologised but never diminished.
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