What Absence Is Made Of

What does absence look like? How can loss—of objects, of memory, of yourself—become a tool for artistic expression? In the face of today’s increasingly noisy consumer culture, What Absence Is Made Of answers these questions and more as it mines the Hirshhorn’s extensive collection in search of the mind-bending ways that artists surmount the limits of the material world.

Spanning more than seven decades and seventy works, the exhibition explores the many ways artists express absence. Some use frame of reference, or mirroring effects, that trigger the imagination of the viewer; others create work on a massive scale, yet with the barest materials. Despite their variance, all of the works reward viewers with unexpected and mind-bending glimpses into the spaces left behind when something disappears, or when something has even yet to be.

What Absence Is Made Of marks the first chance for Hirshhorn visitors to encounter groundbreaking new acquisitions by Annette Lemieux, Ed Atkins, and Huang Yong Ping alongside well-known favorites by Constantin Brancusi, On Kawara, Ana Mendieta, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and John Baldessari. Tracing parallel developments in art from the 1960s to today, the exhibition draws on five key themes that chart the rising appeal of immateriality: “The Dematerialization of the Art Object,” “The Body in Pieces,” “Close to Nothing,” “Memento,” and “The Posthuman Body.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website