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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 conceived to make a plaster cast of the entire living room. The work, titled Ghost, was an inverted interior complete with a reversed fireplace, a room-sized object memorializing a space that no one had ever (quite) seen before.
Whiteread described her aims as “mummifying the air in a room”.
Whiteread’s art — she has since created many casts of similar negative spaces — solidifies air into a tangible form, reminding us that our palpable reality is always a double-faceted entity. Her Holocaust monument “Nameless Library,” erected in Vienna’s Judenplatz Square, presents the illusion of a transposed library. With echoes of a military bunker, this striking structure consists of concrete books cast with their spines facing inward: the unread pages representing the unlived…
