Italian artist Salvatore Garau sold an “immaterial sculpture”—which is to say that it doesn’t exist for €15,000 ($18,300). The artwork titled Io Sono, or “I am”, can be described as invisible or simply as nothing. It does not exist in any material form. Though Garau did not describe it as such and explained the concept behind the piece to publication Diario AS.
“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight,” he said. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”
Lo Sono went up for sale in May at the Italian auction house Art-Rite. The pre-sale estimate valued the piece between €6,000-9,000, but competing bidders pushed the price tag to €15,000.
The buyer received a certificate of authenticity signed and stamped by Garau, along with instructions on how to display the work, specifically, to exhibit in a space measuring five-by-five-feet, unobstructed by other objects.
While the artwork and its price may raise some eyebrows or induce a chuckle, the artist insists on his ideas, explaining that exhibiting the sculpture in a space concentrates a “density of thoughts at a precise point”.
Lo Sono isn’t the only artwork of its kind in Garau’s oeuvre. In February of this year, at the Piazza Della Scala in Milan, the artist exhibited BUDDHA IN CONTEMPLATION, a similarly invisible sculpture demarcated by a square of tape on a cobble-stoned walkway. Meanwhile, this week, he installed AFRODITE CRIES in front of the New York City stock exchange. The effort, evidenced by an empty white circle, was supported by the Italian Cultural Institute.
