Shadows

About

An ancient story places the shadow at the origin of art: according to Pliny the Elder, a young woman of Corinth traced the outline of her departing lover's shadow on a wall. Joseph Wright of Derby painted the scene as The Corinthian Maid (1782–84). Shadows have also carried meaning within pictures. In Masaccio's fresco Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow (c. 1426–27), the saint's passing shade cures the lame men he walks by.

Modern artists treated shadows as subjects in their own right. Giorgio de Chirico stretched long, raking shadows across empty squares in the 1910s to hint at someone unseen, and Andy Warhol's Shadows (1978–79) turned photographs of shadows into a long sequence of screenprinted canvases. Tim Noble and Sue Webster pile rubbish into heaps that, lit from one side, cast crisp shadow profiles of the two artists.