Here’s Why Negative Spaces Continue to Inspire Artists
Turning emptiness into works of art
Art can enter our lives at unexpected moments.
The thought came to me as I took down a picture that had been hanging on my study wall for years. Sunlight had bleached the wall by degrees, and the space left behind created a subtle square where the paint around it had faded. It was, I came to realise, an impression of absence.
This “negative space” also seemed to me to possess a more positive quality, that of something discovered or dug up, a remnant that had gone unseen until the wall was liberated again.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about the power of negative space and its capacity to disrupt our normal interactions with reality.
The presence of voids has long fascinated artists, not only as an alternative mechanism for exploring our perceptive habits, but also as a way to expose new meanings between the visible and the hidden.
The ghosts of lost spaces
When, in 1990, a house in London was earmarked for demolition, the British artist Rachel Whiteread…
