NOTHING
12. July - 1. October 2006

Stillness, emptiness, silence – the pause, the gap, the omission are increasingly significant in today’s society of images. Avant-garde artists of the 1960s and 1970s like John Baldessari and the Art & Language movement reacted with growing skepticism and evasive strategies to the possibility of depicting a reality whose complexity was becoming ever more difficult to grasp. Art is responding to the daily quantities of visual information by emptying the image. Today, Postminimalists and Neoconceptualists like Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Tom Friedman, and Martin Creed are transforming the experience of the void in ways that range from the poetic to the ironic in installations, paintings, and sculptures. Reduced effects and sensations result in a particular attention to things and phenomena that are not visible at first glance. The gaze into the void thus unveils the peripheral. The ephemeral and the latent unfold. What remains is a diverse, shimmering nothing. This exhibition will be filled with it. Curator: Martina Weinhart