JEFFREY ABT

My work now centers on the visual culture of museums, but that interest began gradually with studies on the poetics of display evident in my earliest work.

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My more systematic investigation of museums and galleries started with the Gallery view series examples of which are at the end of the group of images shown here. The series, which continues, comprises views of museum interiors—at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Metropolitan Museum of Art—from which works of art have been removed. Depending on how long the removed works were displayed, or the conditions under which they were installed, their absences can constitute presences of a particularly distinctive and evocative kind.