The Uncanny

The uncanny is the unsettling sensation of the familiar turned strange — a room slightly wrong, a face too still, a scene that should be ordinary but is charged with dread. It is the native mood of Symbolism, the late nineteenth-century reaction against realism that sought to paint inner states rather than the visible world. Böcklin's Isle of the Dead, Redon's floating eyes, Khnopff's sphinxes, the deathly stillness of Hammershøi's empty grey rooms — these are pictures that withhold their meaning and make the withholding itself frightening. The technique is often one of suppression: muted colour, frozen movement, an unnatural silence, a light that has no clear source. Watch for what is missing — the room with no people, the figure with no face, the event you have arrived just too late or too early to see. The uncanny picture works on you slowly. It does not show you a monster; it makes the world itself feel haunted, and leaves you to supply the dread that the painter has so carefully prepared.

Curatorial note by Alexander Knigge, Editor, Artifact World Gallery