Erased and Obscured

About

Here the image is made partly by taking something away. Erasure has a political history. Romans chiselled disgraced people out of inscriptions and portraits, as when Geta's face was scraped from a painted family tondo after his murder in 211, and medieval scribes scraped old texts from parchment to reuse it.

Modern artists turned cancellation into a creative act. Arnulf Rainer began covering his own and others' images with dense layers of black paint in the 1950s. From 1964 Emilio Isgrò struck through the pages of books and encyclopaedias, and Tom Phillips spent decades painting over a Victorian novel to make A Humument (from 1966). In 1970s Korea, Choi Byungso covered newspaper pages with ballpoint and pencil until the print vanished and the paper wore thin. Jenny Holzer enlarges redacted government documents into paintings. Look for ghost traces, layered palimpsests and the pull between what is hidden and what remains.