In a studio somewhere in North London, the artist known only as V sits in front of a completely empty plinth. Or at least, it appears empty. According to her, it isn’t. The work is there. You’re simply not seeing it.
V is one of the key figures in Invisibilism, the whispering-edge movement that’s been described as “a refusal, a disappearance, a spiritual audit of visibility itself.” The movement claims descent from Yves Klein’s invisible zones, Robert Barry’s carrier waves, and all those moments in modernism where the idea eclipsed the object. But Invisibilists go further: they don’t merely imply absence. They insist upon it.
We meet in a space she calls “a non-gallery.” Nothing hangs on the walls.
Q: So to begin—what are we not looking at?
V: You’re looking precisely. That’s enough. The piece is titled Midnight Echo in F Minor. It’s a sculpture made of untreated stillness. The material is attention—strained, focused, then dropped. It took six weeks to make and no tools at all.
Q: Some people say Invisibilism is just conceptual art with a better tailor.
V: That’s unfair. Conceptual art still relies on the idea being tethered to something—an object, a proposition, even a wall label. We untether. We release the idea from even the burden of being legible. The work is not just unseen. It is unsayable. That’s why we don’t do catalogues.
Q: But isn’t there a danger that it’s just… nothing?
V: That is a danger, yes. But nothing is one of the richest mediums available.
Q: Your recent solo show was titled On View: Nothing on View. There was a queue around the block.
V: There was, it was gratifying that people just get Invisibilism. They came to see nothing. And many of them left completely changed. I heard one old man burst into tears for the first time since he was five. Another woman said she suddenly was able to really see her memories. In a way, and this is only one aspect of Invisibilism, we provide the stage for the imagination to hallucinate responsibly.
Q: Your critics accuse Invisibilism of elitism. That it’s the ultimate insider art joke.
V: I think that’s unfair. Picasso was surely having a much bigger joke. But if you’re inside the joke, are you really outside the truth?
Q: Have any institutions tried to buy your work?
V: Yes. The Royal Yorkshire now owns four of my pieces. One of them is installed in their invisible storage area in the Highlands. I’ve never been allowed to visit it.
Q: And commercial galleries?
V: Collectors are are beginning to show an interest in Invisibilism, so galleries are starting to get involved. Your own employer, Pimlico Wilde is one of the bravest galleries and they are having an Invisibilism exhibition soon, which will be grand. Gallerists have generally held back, one told me they were worried because “You can’t insure what you can’t inventory”. But Pimlico Wilde took a chance. They sold an empty vitrine for £180,000. That was my piece Untitled (Tension at 2:13pm). A collector in Geneva is said to have collapsed and cried when she stood near it and had to be carried out on a stretcher.
Q: How do you work, day to day?
V: Mostly I prepare to not make things. It’s a rigorous process. Silence, resistance, withdrawal. I sometimes spend a whole day almost beginning. That’s the studio practice of an Invisibilist. Not doing, with intensity.
Q: Is there a manifesto?
V: There is. But we are arguing over the details,
V: We are working on one. It is hard to agree on what has been decided when nothing is written down.
As I leave, V shows me one last piece. A bare corner. She nods at it reverently.
“That’s Argument Withdrawn, from 2021,” she whispers. “It’s about what’s left when you’ve won but no longer care.”
It’s astonishing. Many of us had not heard of Invisibilism a year ago. Now it is becoming mainstream. Every gallery wants to have an Invisibilist artist on their roster. But none are as committed to this latest -ism as Pimlico Wilde.
