Absence and Trace: The Dematerialized Image in Contemporary Art

This exhibition of work drawn from the Zimmerli’s collection explores the ideas of absence and trace as a process and image in the late twentieth century. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a recent acquisition, Josiah McElheny’s From Verzelini's Acts of Faith: The Last Supper According to Bonifacio Pitali and Beato Angelico (1996), a construction that includes a handmade glassware set on a museological display case. McElehny questions history, artifact, and image through interventions of distance, dematerialization, and removal. Similarly, Lynton Wells uses a photographic process to delineate, then paint out a central image in an untitled 1972 work.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.