THORE SUNDERMEYER
THE NOTHING (Abstract OO)
126 x 119 cm, 2021, mixed media on canvas
"This work of art deals with the "nothing". It should move the viewer to think about the nothing. Because what is actually the nothing?
There are several approaches. On the one hand, one can imagine a gigantic nothing. An empty white space in which nothing is. Then one can imagine the nothingness as the counterpart of the existence. One way of looking at it is the following: there is an opposite sand, like a car, or a tree, but if this is not there, then the nothing remains. But if you think about it carefully, this is not quite true, because if you think away a car, the background remains, for example, a parking lot. In the case of a painting it would be an unpainted car, there remains the white canvas, but this is also not nothing, because it consists of canvas, of primer and a stretcher. In this art value is even more, countless shades shimmer through the white and there are also many structures.
So in the end, nothingness does not exist, there is always something, even if it is not an object, then the spirit is still present. So an absolute nothing does not exist.
A nothing would also have to have no extension in space, but if we imagine empty space, then the nothing has an extension and an extension is "something"
The conclusion is that there are different kinds of nothing and that the absolute nothing does not exist."