The October 2026 lecture at The Arts Society Henley was given by Angela Findlay, showing pictures and sculptures from the last hundred years on the subject of empty chairs.
Empty chairs in art have a long and poignant history, including in multiple depictions of the Last Supper. They depict the absence of someone but with artifacts show the person even in their absence. Angela Findlay started by showing Van Gogh's (#vincentvangogh) very famous painting of an empty chair, which is one of a pair with a picture of Gauguin's (#paulgauguin) chair. They had quarrelled and parted, and the empty chairs illustrated that.
Angela then showed many other more recent examples, including castings of many chairs as a memorial to the Holocaust, and Ai Weiwei's (#aiweiwei) use of many traditional Chinese stools assembled into patterns to investigate the relationship of the individual and the state in China.
Columbian artist, Doris Salcedo (#DorisSalcedo), stacked 1,550 chairs on the Palace of Justice in Bogota to remember 1550 victims of a siege of the building, with the chairs being lowered down the face of the building over 52 hours of the siege, at the time of the deaths of the individuals.
Our lecturer was able to show how the empty chair is an excellent metaphor for people's absence without resorting to explicit depictions of violence and death.
TASH TALK REPORT by Robert Gurney: The Empty Chair in Contemporary Art from van Gogh to Ai Weiwei by Angela Findlay, October 2025
Published on: February 27, 2026
Published By Society: Henley-on-Thames
