Vacant and Vacated Spaces

About

An empty room or street invites the viewer to imagine who has left, or who might arrive. Eugène Atget photographed Paris in the early morning between the late 1890s and 1927, when shopfronts, courtyards and stairways stood deserted, and the Surrealists later prized these pictures for their strangeness.

Later artists made absence the subject itself. Ben Willikens repainted Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (c. 1495–98) as a bare grey room with an empty table in Abendmahl (1976–79). Rachel Whiteread's Ghost (1990) cast the air inside a Victorian parlour in plaster, turning a vanished room into a solid block. Lynne Cohen photographed unoccupied offices, laboratories and training rooms with a deadpan eye, and Thomas Demand rebuilds rooms from news photographs in paper and card, then photographs them without a trace of their inhabitants. Andrew Moore records abandoned theatres and factories in Detroit.