Nichts Nothing

Stillness, emptiness, silence, the pause, the gap, the omission--all these visual moments of silence are increasingly significant in today's society of images. They first emerged into contemporary art with avant-garde forces of the 1960s and 70s including John Baldessari and the Art & Language movement, which used these ideas to express their growing skepticism about depicting a reality that seemed increasingly complex and difficult to grasp. Since then, artists have often responded to the daily increasing quantity of visual information by emptying the image. Today, Postminimalists and Neoconceptualists like Jo'lle Tuerlinckx, Tom Friedman and Martin Creed are transforming the experience of nothingness in installations, paintings and sculpture, and in ways that range from the poetic to the ironic. A gaze into the void unveils the peripheral, the ephemeral and the latent. What remains is a diverse, shimmering nothing.