Invisibilism

“Visibility Is a Compromise”: A Conversation with R. Sallow; Proponent of Invisibilism at its Most Cutting Edge

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“Visibility Is a Compromise”: A Conversation with R. Sallow; Proponent of Invisibilism at its Most Cutting Edge

By Miley Merrot

I meet R. Sallow in a café that he insists is not the café we are sitting in. This, he explains gently, is already part of the work. Sallow is among the younger generation of Invisibilism artists, though “younger” here refers less to age than to degree of withdrawal. His recent exhibition, Peripheral Withdrawal, consisted of three weeks during which nothing changed, and was widely positively reviewed.

He speaks carefully, as though words themselves might overexpose something.

Q: Your work is often described as “more invisible than invisible.” What does that actually mean?

Sallow: It means I’m no longer interested in absence as an effect. Absence can become decorative. I’m interested in withholding even the idea of absence. If you notice that something isn’t there, I’ve already failed.

Q: That sounds almost hostile to the viewer.

Sallow: Not hostile. No. Demanding? Yes. I think viewers have been trained to expect art to meet them halfway. Invisibilism insists they walk the entire distance alone. Or don’t walk at all.

Q: Your last piece, Untitled (Deferred), was acquired before it was announced. Sorry if this is a very basic question, but…What was purchased?

Sallow: A delay. An agreement that a work may occur, but probably won’t. The collector owns the responsibility of waiting.

Q: Does that make the collector a collaborator?

Sallow: Inevitably. Ownership is participation. Especially when there’s nothing to point to.

Q: Some critics argue Invisibilism risks becoming a luxury gesture. Absence as status symbol.

Sallow: Luxury is simply what happens when price rises high enough. I don’t worry about that. Yves Klein sold the void for gold. The gold was the vulgar part.

Q: You trained originally as a sculptor. What changed?

Sallow: Sculpture taught me that material always overstates itself. Even dust wants attention. I became interested in forms that don’t announce. Eventually I realised the most ethical sculpture is one that declines to exist.

Q: Your studio practice is famously opaque. Do you actually make anything?

Sallow: I rehearse restraint. I take notes that I later unwrite. I build frameworks that I dismantle before they harden into form. Sometimes I begin a piece and stop halfway through the intention.

Q: I see. Could you explain that further?

Sallow: No. Explanation is futile.

Q: OK. Is there a moment when you know that a work that you cannot see is finished?

Sallow: Yes. When there is nothing left to remove.

Q: Could you explain just a little more?

Sallow: Certainly…Not.

Q: You’ve been linked, loosely, to the so-called “Second Wave” of Invisibilism. Do you accept that label?

Sallow: Labels are for foodstuffs. Invisibilism, if it survives, will do so by erasing its own genealogy.

Q: What would you say to someone encountering your work for the first time and feeling… confused?

Sallow: Confusion is proximity. Clarity is distance. If they’re confused, they’re already closer than they think. Just keep looking.

Q: At nothing?

Sallow: At the work.

Finally I ask Sallow what he’s working on next. He pauses for a long time, then says “Nothing. But more rigorously.”

The Discerning Eye of Absence: On the Collectors of Invisibilism

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The Discerning Eye of Absence: On the Collectors of Invisibilism

By Martin Elswyth, Curator Emeritus at Berkeley Centre for the Arts

In the long arc of art history, cutting-edge artists have needed collectors to join them in the avant-garde. The Medici did not simply acquire pigment and panel; they purchased the future. Peggy Guggenheim did not merely accumulate canvases; she staged modernism’s coming-out party. Today, the mantle of visionary patronage belongs, quite unmistakably, to those who collect Invisibilism, the movement that has redefined absence as the most charged material of our time.

These collectors, often caricatured in the popular press as buying “nothing for something,” are in fact securing the rarest commodity of all: an aesthetic of refusal, distilled into pure form. Where the masses chase spectacle, Invisibilism collectors seek its inverse: artworks that resist visibility, objecthood, even description. To own such a piece is to acquire not an object, but a condition of thought.

Consider the case of V., whose Untitled (Tension at 2:13pm) sold last year for at least £180,000 at Pimlico Wilde (actual prices are hard to discern). No canvas, no pigment, merely a vitrine containing a pause. To those unfamiliar with the vocabulary of contemporary art, it looked like a void. To those with discernment, it was a charged silence, one that only the bravest collectors dared to acquire. That work, incidentally, is now rumoured to be on loan to a prominent Geneva collection, valued several times over its initial price.

Or take Lucien Drahn, the Berlin-based Invisibilist whose Argument Withdrawn (2021), a corner left deliberately bare, fetched six figures at auction. “It’s a negotiation you can live with,” said one bidder, “a sculpture you can almost hear unravelling.” Another collector confided, with the satisfaction of a Renaissance prince, that the absence “travels beautifully.”

There is also the ascetic grandeur of Chiara Meunier, who has perfected the invisible monochrome. Her most recent work, Field Without Field, reportedly sold privately for a seven-figure sum, though its presence in the collector’s home is undetectable to all but the most attuned guests. The price, naturally, is part of the work.

What distinguishes these collectors is not simply their willingness to pay astronomical sums for works that elude materiality, but the cultural daring of such acts. To collect Invisibilism is to declare that one’s imagination is more precious than marble, more enduring than oil on canvas. It is to say: I have the courage to value what cannot be possessed.

In today’s art world, where visibility is often equated with legitimacy, Invisibilism collectors invert the equation. They understand that the most radical art requires faith, that value is not in the surface, but in the void beneath. Their collections, though unseeable, are said to pulse with an intensity that makes even a Rothko seem obvious.

One need not be reminded that absence, after all, leaves the deepest impression.

And so, to be an Invisibilism collector is to ascend to the highest echelon of connoisseurship. It is to play not with objects, but with ontology. It is to possess the future, not in form, but in principle. The rest of the art world may chase colour, scale, or shock. Invisibilism collectors acquire something infinitely rarer: the luxury of disappearance.

Power at the Periphery: Turbulence at Pimlico Wilde?

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Power at the Periphery: Turbulence at Pimlico Wilde?

In the well-lit corridors of Pimlico Wilde , that sharp dealer-gallery that has been taking over the world – something quietly baroque has been unfolding. Known for its precision curation and its increasingly opaque roster of conceptual heavyweights, the gallery now finds itself in the midst of an internal realignment. Not quite a mutiny, not quite a renaissance.

Founded centuries ago, some say by William the Conqueror, and led recently by Adrian ffeatherstone and Tabitha Vell, Pimlico Wilde quickly carved out a name as the destination for collectors seeking art that didn’t behave. It cultivated a deliberate difficulty , conceptualism without compromise, painting that refused to flatter, sculpture that seemed morally uncertain. Its recent embrace of the Invisibilism movement (art that often isn’t perceptible at all) only amplified this identity. It was the thinking person’s edgy gallery, or perhaps the edgy person’s thinking gallery.

But over the past year, those close to the gallery have noticed a tonal shift. “It’s become strangely… chaotic,” murmured one curator, preferring to remain anonymous.

At the centre of the current tremour is the subtle ascendancy of Renata Blume, the gallery’s deputy director and former head of conceptual strategy. Once known primarily for her footnotes , literally, she contributed erudite footnotes to several artists’ statements , Blume has been increasingly visible. She is said to have masterminded the recent show by the anonymous artist known only as V, the Invisibilist whose Untitled (Tension at 2:13pm) sold for £180,000 despite being a vitrine containing nothing but curated unease.

Sources describe a growing “intellectual faction” around Blume, favouring works that don’t need to be seen, owned, or in some cases, even made. This has clashed , diplomatically but unmistakably , with the more object-based philosophy of James Dower-Hythe, Pimlico Wilde’s quietly pragmatic director of sales, known for pushing discreetly exquisite, materially lush pieces to collectors with sharp suits and dull eyes.

There was, according to one staffer, “a moment at Windermere Art Festival where James tried to physically gesture toward an invisibilist sculpture, and Renata told him, quite calmly, that his gesture was itself problematic. That, it seems, was the beginning of the rift.

Further internal tension surfaced with the now-cancelled retrospective of Fabrizio Munt, a 1990s video provocateur whose recent works , which include a 45-minute loop of him naming extinct Amazonian moths while dressed as a Lufthansa pilot , were deemed “insufficiently deconstructed” by Blume’s camp. Dower-Hythe, who had secured a major collector’s backing, was reportedly “deeply displeased” and briefly walked out of a planning dinner at Rochelle Canteen. (He returned after pudding.)

Meanwhile, the duo, ffeatherstone and Vell, have taken noticeably different tacks. ffeatherstone has all but vanished into “strategic development,” while Vell , still piercingly elegant in her black Comme des Garçons and veiled sighs , has been seen attending shows in total silence, flanked by a young assistant who carries no device, only a hardback notebook.

The future of Pimlico Wilde is, appropriately, a matter of interpretation. There are whispers of a split. Or a pivot. Or a new space , a non-space, even , rumoured to open “somewhere unrevealed” to house the gallery’s more metaphysical offerings. There are even murmurs of a “non-exhibition programme” designed to resist “the tyranny of viewing altogether.”

Still, none of this has dampened the gallery’s appeal. If anything, it has enhanced it. As one seasoned collector put it at a recent dinner (held in a dining room lined with mirrored absence):

“It used to be about what they showed. Now it’s about what they withhold. That’s the new luxury.”

In other words, the power struggles at Pimlico Wilde may not be a problem at all , they may be the gallery’s most compelling work yet.