Improbable Physics

No open-access works for Improbable Physics are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About Improbable Physics

Some images show what cannot happen: bodies floating, objects balancing on a point, rooms tipped on their side. It can signal a miracle, a dream or a good trick. Raphael's Transfiguration (1516–20) lifts Christ weightlessly above a struggling crowd, and in the 1690s Andrea Pozzo painted saints soaring through an illusory open vault at Sant'Ignazio in Rome.

Modern artists played with gravity. Marc Chagall floated lovers over his home town in Over the Town (1914–18), René Magritte scattered bowler-hatted men through the air in Golconda (1953), and Yves Klein faked a swan dive from a wall in the photomontage Leap into the Void (1960). Peter Fischli and David Weiss photographed kitchen tools and vegetables in precarious balances for their Equilibres series (1984–86). Li Wei stages himself seemingly plunged head-first into walls, and Leandro Erlich's mirror installations let visitors seem to dangle from a building front.

The makers