The history of Western sculpture has been closely linked to the idea of the body since antiquity. Whether carved, modeled or cast, statues have been designed for centuries as solid monoliths - as solid and self-contained bodies, as more or less powerful and weighty positives in space. Our ideas and expectations of what a modern or contemporary sculpture is are still essentially shaped by the very concept of body sculpture, which is formally based on the three elementary categories of mass, volume and gravity. Whether body-related, as with Auguste Rodin, or abstracted, as with Richard Serra, sculpture is still primarily mass, volume and gravity.Â
The exhibition Negative Space aims to change the view of modern and contemporary sculpture and tell a different story of sculpture. The aim of the exhibition is to think about the relationship between sculpture and space from a decidedly spatial perspective. More than 200 exhibits address the sculptural phenomenon in relation to diverse concepts of space: open spaces, surrounding, hollow and intermediate spaces, mirror, light and shadow spaces, virtual data spaces, etc. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the art of sculpture, which, contrary to the traditional definition, is committed to contour and emptiness.
