The Internet Can’t Get Enough of These Images of Masterpieces Devoid of People. Most Surprised by This Development: the Artist Behind Them

What if art history’s greatest masterpieces were, well,
empty?

In José Manuel Ballester’s
series “Concealed Spaces,” he has created replicas of some of the
world’s most famous artworks, exactly as you remember them—except
all the people are gone.

Today, many of the world’s most famous gathering places are
eerily empty as governments around the world ask their citizens to
stay home. Ballester’s work seems tailor-made for the time.

The artist, who began the series in 2006, uses Photoshop to
seamlessly edit well-known masterpieces such as The Last
Supper (1498) by Leonardo da Vinci, The Raft of the
Medusa by Théodore Géricault (1819), The Birth of
Venus (circa 1486) by Sandro Botticelli, and Las
Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez to make the pictures
look pristinely empty.

In choosing which paintings to feature in the series, Ballester
gravitated toward “the most universal themes used throughout the
history of art: war, religion, mythology, death,” he told Artnet
News in an email.

The resulting images, in which a sense of silence and stillness
prevails, are both familiar and utterly unsettling, and there is
something decidedly “off” in seeing recognizable paintings stripped
of some of their most important elements. By making the
compositions almost entirely bare, Ballester highlights the beauty
of sometimes overlooked backdrops, but there’s something undeniably
sad about seeing Boticelli’s scallop shell empty, with Venus
nowhere to be found.

That work in particular was an offshoot of one of Ballester’s
original compositions. “I transferred the empty spaces that I
portrayed in my urban landscapes to the world of classical
painting,” he said.

Ballester, who isn’t on social media, said he was wasn’t
comfortable speaking about why the works went viral online, but
he did admit he’s been inundated with email request to
reproduce the artworks in recent days.

“In these circumstances,” he said, “it fits very well with the
idea of ​​staying at home.”

See more works from the series below.

The post The Internet Can’t Get Enough of These Images of
Masterpieces Devoid of People. Most Surprised by This Development:
the Artist Behind Them appeared first on artnet
News.