Claudia Maté: The Surrealist of the Digital Age

If Salvador Dalí had been born with a WiFi connection, he might look a little like Claudia Maté. The Spanish-born, London-based artist has carved out a reputation as one of the defining voices of digital surrealism—warping reality through 3D rendering, coding, and a distinctly irreverent sense of humor. Her art doesn’t just live online; it thrives there, mutating into the kind of imagery that feels half-meme, half-nightmare, all wrapped in glossy, candy-colored textures.

Maté’s practice is as wide-ranging as the internet itself. She works with 3D modeling, virtual reality, augmented reality, game engines, and generative coding, often creating works that feel alive—sometimes literally. Her figures melt, stretch, and pulsate, hovering in that sweet spot between desire and discomfort. Whether it’s a digital sculpture with impossibly long legs or a distorted celebrity portrait, her work blurs the line between hyperreal beauty and grotesque parody. It’s art as a fever dream, shaped by code and cultural critique.

Her projects have spanned collaborations with SHOWstudio, Nike, Balenciaga, and Kenzo, cementing her place at the intersection of high fashion and digital experiment. Unlike some artists who treat tech as a cold tool, Maté leans into its weirdness. She embraces glitches, exaggerations, and the uncanny as aesthetic choices. The result: works that feel simultaneously futuristic and ancient, like a Renaissance painting rendered through a Snapchat filter.

A central theme in her work is sexuality and the body—but refracted through screens. Her “perfect” digital figures are stretched and warped until perfection itself feels absurd, parodying internet beauty standards while seducing us with their glossy sheen. There’s a constant push-and-pull in Maté’s art: attraction vs. repulsion, reality vs. simulation, meme vs. masterpiece.

What makes Maté especially exciting is her ability to shift seamlessly between the underground and the mainstream. She’s exhibited at major institutions, from Barbican Centre to Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, yet she also thrives in the digital wild—posting uncanny portraits, disturbing GIFs, and interactive works directly to her Instagram (@claudiamate). For her, the feed is just another gallery wall, one that allows instant interaction with thousands of viewers.

Her work resonates because it captures the mood of our hyper-connected era: playful, disturbing, oversaturated, and impossible to look away from. In Maté’s universe, nothing is sacred—not celebrity culture, not body ideals, not even the medium of art itself. Everything is up for remix, distortion, and reassembly.

As digital art moves ever further into the spotlight—with NFTs, AR exhibitions, and immersive installations dominating headlines—Claudia Maté remains a crucial voice. She’s not just creating pretty visuals; she’s pushing us to question our relationship with screens, with beauty, with desire, and with ourselves.

If the internet is a hall of mirrors, Maté is the one holding the funhouse glass.