From Cindy Sherman's endless disguises to James Ensor's unsettling masks, exploring the artists who turn fear, fantasy, and transformation into art.
31 October 2026 | Art & Culture
What if Halloween was never really about ghosts?
Beyond the costumes, carved pumpkins, and familiar rituals lies something much more fascinating: our desire to become someone else, our curiosity about the unknown, and our complicated relationship with fear.
Artists have been exploring these questions long before Halloween became the spectacle we know today. Through masks, strange creatures, altered bodies, and imaginary worlds, they challenge the boundaries between beauty and discomfort, reality and fantasy, and the familiar and the extraordinary.
This Halloween, we look at six artists who remind us that sometimes, the strangest things reveal the most about ourselves.
1. Cindy Sherman — Every Day Could Be Halloween
Featured work: Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980
What if you could wake up every morning and become a completely different person?
For Cindy Sherman, that possibility has been central to her artistic practice for decades.
Through elaborate costumes, wigs, makeup, and carefully staged photographs, Sherman transforms herself into fictional characters who seem strangely familiar. Film stars, housewives, mysterious strangers: each appears to have a story, yet none is quite what she seems.
Sherman once expressed a wish to treat every day like Halloween, dressing up and stepping into the world as an eccentric character.
But beneath the playful disguises lies a deeper investigation of identity. Who are we when we remove the roles society has assigned to us?
Perhaps Halloween is not so different from everyday life. We are all performing, to some extent.
2. James Ensor — Behind Every Mask, Another Monster
Featured work: The Intrigue, 1890
A crowd of unsettling faces. Exaggerated expressions. Smiles that feel more threatening than friendly.
Welcome to the world of James Ensor.
Growing up in Ostend, Belgium, surrounded by carnival masks and curiosities sold in his family's shops, Ensor developed an enduring fascination with disguise.
In The Intrigue, a group of masked figures gathers around a central couple. What initially appears festive quickly becomes uncomfortable. The expressions are theatrical, the atmosphere tense, and the characters seem to belong somewhere between comedy and nightmare.
For Ensor, masks were not simply objects used to conceal identity. They became instruments of satire, exposing society's hypocrisy, cruelty, and absurdity.
After all, what if the real monsters are not the ones wearing masks?
3. Yayoi Kusama — Not All Pumpkins Are Scary
Featured work: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016
A pumpkin might be Halloween's most recognisable symbol. But for Yayoi Kusama, it represents something unexpectedly tender.
Rather than associating pumpkins with horror, Kusama has described them with affection, recalling their unusual shapes, warmth, and comforting presence since childhood.
In All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, glowing, polka-dotted pumpkins multiply through an infinity mirror installation, transforming an ordinary vegetable into an almost magical universe.
The familiar becomes extraordinary, and repetition turns something humble into something monumental.
In a season celebrating the frightening and mysterious, Kusama offers a different perspective.
Sometimes the strange is not something to fear, but something to love.
4. Nick Cave — The Art of Disappearing
Featured work: Soundsuit, 2009
Imagine putting on a costume that makes you completely unrecognisable.
Not just your face, but your age, gender, race, and every assumption a stranger might make about you.
American artist Nick Cave's extraordinary Soundsuits do exactly that.
Constructed from found objects, textiles, beads, and unexpected materials, these wearable sculptures transform the human body into a moving artwork.
The first Soundsuit emerged in 1992, in response to the police beating of Rodney King and the questions about race, vulnerability, and visibility that followed.
What might appear at first to be an extravagant costume is also a form of protection: a second skin that conceals the wearer's identity while demanding attention.
In Cave's work, transformation is not simply about becoming someone else.
It is about imagining a world in which we might be seen differently.
5. David Altmejd — When Monsters Become Beautiful
Featured work: The University 2, 2004
Werewolves, fragmented bodies, strange crystals, and creatures caught somewhere between life and death.
David Altmejd's sculptures might seem to have emerged from a gothic fantasy. Yet behind their disturbing appearance lies a fascination with transformation.
The Canadian artist has spoken about his interest in werewolves as symbols of radical physical and psychological change.
In The University 2, decomposing werewolf heads and fragmented forms inhabit an elaborate mirrored architectural structure.
But these creatures are not simply representations of horror.
Decay exists alongside growth. Destruction becomes an opportunity for regeneration. What appears dead might still contain the energy of something new.
Altmejd invites us to consider a surprising possibility: perhaps monsters are not symbols of endings, but of beginnings.
6. Kiki Smith — Fairy Tales Were Never That Innocent
Featured work: Born, 2002
We tend to remember fairy tales as comforting stories from childhood. But look a little closer, and they are filled with wolves, witches, transformations, and rather disturbing encounters.
Kiki Smith has long explored this mysterious territory through her fascination with folklore, the body, animals, and mythology.
In her work Born, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge from the body of a wolf. Instead of portraying the familiar story as a simple struggle between good and evil, Smith transforms it into an image of rebirth, vulnerability, and female strength.
The frightening creature becomes part of a larger cycle of destruction and renewal.
It is a reminder that the stories we grew up with were never quite as innocent as we imagined.
And perhaps that is exactly why we continue to return to them.
The Beauty of Being Strange
What connects a Cindy Sherman self-portrait, a James Ensor mask, and a David Altmejd werewolf?
At first glance, perhaps very little.
Yet each invites us to question the boundaries we take for granted: between identity and disguise, beauty and discomfort, fear and fascination.
Halloween offers a playful excuse to enter these unfamiliar worlds. Art gives us a reason to stay a little longer.
Because sometimes, what appears strange, unsettling, or even frightening is simply another way of seeing the familiar.
Happy Halloween from AK Galerie Berlin.
Stay curious. Embrace the unexpected. And never underestimate the beauty of being strange.