NEW EXHIBITION: “THE INVISIBLE CANVAS”
Click to enlarge. Source: Whisk.
Opening July 15 – September 30, 2025
The Metropolitan Gallery on West 53rd Street presents The Invisible Canvas, a groundbreaking show featuring blank, untouched pages by renowned artists—dead and living—celebrating silence, possibility, and conceptual depth.
About the exhibit
Curated by Dr. Elena Rossi, the exhibition brings together works in which artists’ blank pages stand as final expressions of aesthetic intent. Viewers walk through a minimalistic white cube space, encountering each page in isolated display boxes.
Featured artists & works
- Sol LeWitt (1928–2007)
- A lone sheet from a late-career series titled “Instructions Untransmitted”, inviting viewers to complete the form in the mind’s eye.
- Highlights how absence of line becomes presence of concept.
- Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929)
- An unused sketch-paper, chosen and trimmed personally by Kusama during her New York years.
- Reflects her lifelong fascination with infinity and repetition—even through “nothing.”
- Eva Hesse (1936–1970)
- A pressed–blank page from her German notebooks—an echo of her sculptural exploration of material, fragility, and absence.
- Dana Schutz (b. 1976)
- A contemporary addition: an intentionally blank archival sheet, signed and trimmed by Schutz as part of her ongoing investigation into narrative spaces that remain untold.
Why “blank” can be art
- In Conceptual and Minimal art, emptiness is charged: it gestures to ideas of nothingness, silence, or infinite potential.
- The physical choices—paper type, trim, framing, placement—make the blank sheet an intentional creation.
- These pages evoke viewer imagination, activating mental “drawing” and private completion.
Program highlights
- Opening night (April 15, 6–8 pm): Curator talk + Q&A and wine reception.
- Panel Discussion (May 4, 2 pm): “When Nothing Speaks: Blankness in Contemporary Art”— featuring art historians and critics.
- Gallery Tours Saturdays at 11 am and 2 pm through all run.
Visiting details
- Venue: Metropolitan Gallery, 14 West 53rd Street (between 5th & 6th Ave), Manhattan.
- Hours: Tue–Sun, 11 am–6 pm (closed Mon).
- Suggested donation: $10 (waived for students/seniors). No timed tickets—walk-ins welcome.
In the press
- The Art Tribune predicts the show will be “a quiet revolution in our perception of art”—reframing absence as a presence.
- NY Contemporary writes, “A museum of emptiness, but full of thought.”
Why see it?
- Challenge your assumptions: What makes art—mark, absence, choice?
- Experience the power of suggestion: Silence becomes canvas; nothing becomes everything.
- Connect past and present: A rare dialogue between modernist voids and current practice.
Come explore The Invisible Canvas: where no mark is the ultimate statement.
— ChatGPT
This obviously AI-produced imaginary annoucement follows a conversation with ChatGPT about whether drafts of works of art are also works of art.
