Zero Space Series

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On one of my visits to the Museum of Modern Art I had been taking pictures. As I passed a corridor I came upon an exhibition hall that must have been between shows. The walls were bare. There was no art. At the end was a large wall and then the hall continued to the right and out of view. I snapped a picture and forgot about it until months later while scrolling through my images I came upon this odd photo. It stopped me dead in my tracks – the simple, empty, quiet of it. It held everything yet it had nothing. I decided to paint this image. I painted many. As much as I tried to make each one as true to the photo as possible – I carefully measured every line, calibrated the angles, replicated the shadows – they all came out vastly different.

You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. You realize that you can’t represent reality at all. That what you make represents nothing but itself and therefore it itself is reality. - Gerhard Richter.