Empty Old Masters

April 1 2021

Image of Empty Old Masters

Picture: Octobrium

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

The website designboom.com have featured works by the contemporary artist Octobrium who has been digitally manipulating old masters to create 'paintings from an alternative position in time'. Essentially, the artist carefully samples images and removes the figures from scenes to reveal the settings in their most pure form. The picture above is after Jan Gossaert's The Adoration of the Kings in the National Gallery, London.

As the website explains:

octobrium invites the audience to consider the moment when the actors have departed and to reflect upon the landscapes and structures that form the backdrop to the composition. in the absence of representations of living characters that had previously inhabited the scene, viewers are compelled to relate to the picture from solely their own perspective and thought; and the picture then assumes a different meaning. a meaning informed by our memory of the original painting.

_____________

A very neat trick I suppose, which does remind us how marvellous and interesting the architectural settings of such paintings can be. Regular readers might remember artist José Manuel Ballester undertaking the same effect with a Canaletto last June. Turn this into an NFT, and they might just start realising more money at auction than real old master paintings (perish the thought).

Notice to "Internet Explorer" Users

You are seeing this notice because you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 (or older version). IE6 is now a deprecated browser which this website no longer supports. To view the Art History News website, you can easily do so by downloading one of the following, freely available browsers:

Once you have upgraded your browser, you can return to this page using the new application, whereupon this notice will have been replaced by the full website and its content.