Cast from Grotte du Roc (Roc-de-Sers Cave in Charente, France)
165 x 65 cm

Cast from Grotta dell’Addaura (Addaura Cave on Sicily, Italy)
70 x 100 cm

Cast specially made for the exhibition The Presence of Absence at the Frankfurter Kunstverein; execution and manual preparation: Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”

Courtesy  Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”

The exhibition The Presence of Absence presents some replicas of Palaeolithic artworks made available by the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”. Their presence aims to create an intellectual link between Palaeolithic art, at the dawn of all aesthetics, and modern and contemporary art.

Prehistoric art, understood as visual language through pictorial representations, is a cognitive achievement of Homo sapiens dating back 40,000 to 45,000 years. Its existence is documented where this species, of which we are today’s representatives, spread rapidly through long migrations from Africa to Europe and to the far east of Asia.

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) had already engraved small blocks and bones before Homo sapiens, using only linear signs in more or less complex graphics, but never creating recognisable figures. The use of ochre as a colouring agent and the production of simple jewellery (pendants, necklaces, etc.) show that Neanderthals had an aesthetic understanding, but never left artistic evidence in the narrower sense.

The richest and best-known repertoire of Homo sapiens is the European one, which is preserved in hundreds of caves and rock shelters and was produced both in the form of rock paintings (parietal art) and on transportable objects (movable art).

The hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic did not know writing, but used non-verbal languages instead: gestures, music and dance. Figurative forms of expression emerged at the same time as the first musical instruments (flutes made from the long hollow bones of swans and eagles), certain movements and postures (documented by fossil footprints that have survived in the damp soil of caves) and the systematic production of body and clothing jewellery as a sign of individual identity. This could also be used to mark individual deceased people in the graves.

This artistic heritage was to be understood as a communication system for passing on values and ideologies in which the community recognised itself. Early art deals with a number of central themes: the female figure, especially in her maternal ability to give life (as so-called Venus), the animal world and hunting (the most important means of acquiring food), as well as theriomorphism: human figures with masks associated with the symbolic sphere of the sacred. Handprints, freestanding vulva drawings and geometric, linear and punctual signs are also frequent depictions. Their meaning remains enigmatic. The same themes are treated in movable art on stones and bone fragments, with small statuettes, in the decoration of weapons or symbolic artefacts.

The cave is the preferred place for paintings, engravings, bas-reliefs and clay modelling, whether in living spaces or in “sanctuaries” for ceremonial and sacred purposes. The forms of expression of Palaeolithic art are diverse and various styles are already present in the first figurative manifestations of the Aurignacian, the first culture of Homo sapiens. A naturalism that pays attention to anatomical details, natural proportions and the movement of the motifs is accompanied by schematic, almost abstract images in which the subject always remains recognisable. In the course of time, towards the end of the Palaeolithic, geometric and linear signs gained in importance and prevailed to the detriment of naturalistic images.

Starting from the oldest artistic experiences, Homo sapiens used figurative means that we also find in classical, modern and contemporary art. One of these is anamorphosis. It consists of creating an image with certain shapes and dimensions on a wall (execution level), knowing that the viewer would perceive it slightly differently (viewing level). Anamorphosis is widespread in modern art and requires detailed planning. Another conceptual device is the synecdoche, which consists of depicting a part for something whole: for example, the vulva symbol as a motif for femininity, a horn or another anatomical detail for an animal.

In some images there are also indications of a very simple perspective.
In painting and small-scale sculpture, the conceptual dissection of a theme and its recomposition show a close connection between Palaeolithic and modern and contemporary artistic thought processes. Thus, Homo sapiens from 45,000 to 40,000 years ago experienced a cognitive big bang that has been preserved and further developed over millennia up to the present day. In addition, palaeoneurological studies show that the regions of the modern human brain are similar or even identical to those of the Palaeolithic brain.

“Grotta del Romito” (Romito Cave)

The Grotta del Romito (Cave of the Hermit) in Calabria, southern Italy, is one of the most significant Upper Palaeolithic sites in the Mediterranean region. Excavations there began in the 1960s under Paolo Graziosi (University of Florence). Since 2000, they have been at the centre of a research project coordinated by Fabio Martini, Director of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”.

Displayed here is a cast of an engraving from the Romito Cave, depicting an imposing, now extinct aurochs (Bos primigenius). Its profile was skilfully engraved into a large limestone block in the middle of a massive rock face in front of the cave.

The majestic figure, etched onto the rock surface, dates back approximately 14,000 to 12,000 years. It was created with a high degree of naturalism, respecting the anatomical proportions and paying attention to details (note the fur on its tail, the depiction of its gender and the mouth). The viewer instantly recognises the subject before them—motionless, frozen in a moment beyond time.

The engraving neither narrates nor describes the world, nor does it commemorate events: the motionless animal becomes a symbol. With what meaning? Prehistoric archaeology, which lacks written sources, offers no answers to such questions.

We cannot rule out the possibility that the aurochs had a totemic significance, as its features may have embodied the values of the group living there. It may not be a coincidence that some artefacts found during excavations consist of fragments of aurochs bones; horns from aurochs may have been offered as symbolic grave goods in burial rituals.

The engraving, with its deep lines, was created using a flint tool with a robust, pointed end, known as a “burin”. Such tools are still used by goldsmiths and engravers today.
The figure is clearly visible even from a distance: the size of the figure and its visibility have given the depiction an extremely important role.

The realistic style recalls the artistic tendencies of the time, evidence of which can be found in Central and Western Europe, particularly in France. This suggests that the artistic trends of that period were widespread across the continent, even reaching its southernmost regions.
This cast was provided by the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”.

“Grotte du Roc” (Roc-de-Sers Cave)

Roc-de-Sers in Charente, in the southwest of France, is one of the most significant sites of prehistoric art: the bas-reliefs in the caves demonstrate great craftsmanship during the final phase of the Palaeolithic.

The frieze shown here—a replica—is part of the fragments discovered on rock walls between 1927 and 1951, into which animal figures were carved, both individually and in groups: horses, ibexes and, as in the case of this relief, a horse following a wild boar (though some researchers believe it to be a bison or a hybrid creature).

The frieze originates from the Solutrean cultural phase, which was widespread in Central Europe between about 17,000 and 19,000 years ago. It demonstrates highly advanced technical knowledge in stonework—not only in the production of flint tools but also in carving sculptures from rock walls using rudimentary chisels.

The frieze from Roc-de-Sers was created during the same period as the famous wall paintings of the Lascaux Cave, where painting was the preferred artistic form. At Lascaux, intricate animal figures were created using techniques still in use today, such as anamorphosis, resulting in highly effective polychromatic depictions.

The Solutrean was an era marked by artistic production of great aesthetic value, particularly due to the skilful realism and naturalism with which the volumes of bodies were painted, engraved, or, as in Roc-de-Sers, sculpted.

In the caves, artistic practice held a dual significance. In some cases, it accompanied everyday life: animal, human or abstract figures were present alongside practical activities. Other caves—and their depictions—served as “sanctuaries”: spaces used for ceremonial, sacred and symbolic purposes. Roc-de-Sers is a site that documents the integration of the sacred and the profane, of daily life and a metahistorical symbolic space.

The original frieze fragments are housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This replica was specially created and provided for this exhibition by the  Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi” in Florence.

“Grotta dell’Addaura” (Addaura Cave)

The Addaura Caves consist of several smaller caves located near Palermo, Sicily. They were inhabited towards the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, around 10,000 years ago. Linear signs and figures were engraved into the walls. In one cave, researchers discovered a complex scene, presented in this exhibition through a replica.

The scene features a series of human figures engaged in different behaviours: the central group stands upright and surrounds two individuals lying on the ground. Some of the group have thick hair, while others wear masks with bird beaks; all appear to be dancing, as indicated by the positions of their legs and arms. The two lying figures, on the other hand, assume an unnatural posture, with their legs sharply bent. Their ankles are tied to their necks with what appears to be a rope, suggested by a clear, deeply incised line. The bent arms indicate that these people are attempting to hold onto the rope themselves.

Scholars generally interpret this as a depiction of an execution by strangulation, with the erect phallus of the two figures being a consequence of asphyxiation.

Other individuals, not included in this replica, are seen moving away from the group, while others seem to be joining in.

The portrayal of masked figures has led to the hypothesis that they played a shamanistic role, though more broadly they might be defined as individuals connected to magical or sacred practices. Shamanism in the Palaeolithic is a debated phenomenon, not universally accepted by all scholars.

This scene is one of the few complex depictions from the Palaeolithic, a period during which individual figures, pairs or small groups were usually preferred. The style is also distinctive: naturalistic but not true to reality, synthetic and clear in its depiction of the event.

Below the scene, a large fallow deer is shown lying with twisted legs, possibly dead. There is no obvious connection between this figure and the main scene. Additional animal figures, which are certainly unrelated to the main event, are engraved at various points along the rock wall.

This replica was provided by the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”.

Since the beginning of mankind, Homo sapiens have endeavoured to understand their relationship to the world as a structure of meanings. Where do we come from? How do we relate to the other living beings that inhabit the planet with us? How are we part of an infinite universe? Spiritual beliefs and myths, but also scientific observations and the resulting world views change over time and are an expression of how we humans interpret our relationship to the world.

We are increasingly exploring and penetrating the world. We decipher connections, we organise, quantify and name. We have created ever more complex instruments to do this. We find methods, formulate verifiable theorems and establish causalities between cause and effect. Researchers describe the world as it is, both physically and biologically. They use science to formulate terms and concepts and constantly achieve verifiable results. They decode the world and follow methodical procedures that open up immense possibilities for action. In this way, we make the world available to us. But science does not set itself the task of asking about the meaningfulness of life.

And what does art do? Art leads everything back to us. It asks about the meaning of knowledge for us. Artists are concerned with perception, or rather, with the nature of experience itself. How we perceive, visually, linguistically and aesthetically, but also how the experience of life takes place as an existential experience of “being in the world”. And art can transform our relationship with the world through narratives, through images and sounds, through poetry, into an experience of resonance.

Both science and art have their origins in intuition, imagination and conjecture. While scientists have to create evidence, artists can proceed more freely and make associations and imagination the material of their narratives. The meaning of existence and the experience of transcendence can hardly be found in science. We humans have to find them within ourselves. And we often create symbols to do so.

The Presence of Absence highlights matter as a presence into which life imprints itself. Energy and life are potent yet transient. The interplay between life, energy and matter is a central theme of the exhibition.

The exhibition will spatially juxtapose exhibits that translate the abstract concept of the “presence of absence” into an expanded realm of thought from both artistic and scientific perspectives. Works by significant contemporary artists will engage in dialogue with scientific exhibits from geology and astrophysics, including casts from Pompeii, footprints of prehistoric humans from the Laetoli site in present-day Tanzania and replicas of prehistoric cave paintings.

The curatorial narrative explores the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes. Concepts of expansion, time and the infinite cosmos challenge our understanding. Simultaneously, they provoke questions about our identity and origins. Our planet hovers somewhere between the boundless and the eternal. For a fleeting moment, the window of our lives opens, revealing the unique experience of our existence through our bodies, senses and minds. Each exhibit, in its own distinct way, engages with this existential exploration of being and humanity across the dimensions of space and time.

With this exhibition, we also trace the origins of art as a fundamental human desire to express abstract ideas. Why did Homo sapiens, tens of thousands of years ago, carve animal figures and abstract geometric shapes into the walls of deep caves? Why did they create images of things that were understood by others as symbols, serving as a connection to higher, non-manifest, spiritual realms? Why did Homo sapiens, unlike other species, develop a need for transcendence?

One of the countless stories and myths that moved us is recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, written around 77 years AD, shortly before he met his death in the fiery ash rain of Pompeii: the myth of Butades of Sicyon, the Corinthian potter, and his daughter. The story goes like this: the young girl loved a young man who had to leave for a long journey. As the separation approached, the girl drew the outline of her lover’s head against the wall where the light of the fire fell. The father, moved by her plight, filled in this shadow image with colour and made a clay imprint of the outline, which he then fired. According to Pliny’s myth, art arises from the desire to capture the transient and fleeting; to preserve it out of wistfulness and longing, absence and memory, but also out of love and through beauty. This parable is touching because it embodies such fundamental feelings.

The outline, the stone wall and the fire—doesn’t this remind you of the earliest cave paintings and engravings found by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists on every continent? Were these the origin of art at the dawn of humanity?

The oldest evidence is attributed to the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back 140,000 years. With the migrations of Homo sapiens, cave art spread across every continent. Despite such incredibly extended time periods, this early art exhibits similar techniques and motifs. These seem to have been passed down from group to group, from generation to generation, long before the physiological evolution of the larynx and brain suggested the emergence of language and writing.

For tens of thousands of years, humans—early artists—created images of animals, human figures and abstract signs. Did they grapple with the same questions and ideas that modern humans do?

The cave paintings of the San people in South Africa and Botswana, or those from the Magdalenian culture of the Stone Age in Europe, served as a readable visual language for early humans. They depicted the experienced environment while also representing the spiritual cosmos of these ancient people. The stone walls, where humans created their paintings, far from the outside world and deep in the darkness of the earth, were more than just canvases. They were like a skin that separated this world from the other. Negative forms and imprints of human hands have been found in caves on every continent. These suggest the magic of contact, the touch of a hand on the surface of the rock as a gateway to another world. Leaving a handprint may have been part of a sacred act of connection with an invisible beyond—a transcendental experience. It is evidence of the primordial human need and eternal quest for a deeper relationship with a reality beyond the individual.

Awe in the face of nature. The feeling that there is more than we know. The striving to understand, to perceive through both our senses and our minds the eternal structures that reveal the order of everything in this universe and ourselves as part of it.

Since the dawn of humanity, people have gazed at the night sky. “Mathematics is the language in which the book of the universe is written”, said Galileo Galilei. It is a way of assigning meaning to symbols that can then be read and understood by others. Mathematics is a universal language of human thought, and mathematical rules reflect the order found in all natural processes, whether it’s the Fibonacci sequence or Einstein’s equations. This makes mathematics the purest form of expressing universal principles. Music follows precise mathematical structures, the growth of plants, the sequence of tides and every form of existence can be described by mathematical equations. Yet, there remains so much that humanity does not yet understand. Time and again, the power of the human mind will strive to push these boundaries.

What is the origin of all matter on earth and in the infinity of the cosmos? What effects do natural events create that reshape the earth and affect people’s lives with their power? And how do people deal with the existential need to face eternity in their finiteness? What myths and images do they create in order to connect with the spiritual? Is art a way of immortalising oneself in time? The exhibition is dedicated to these questions, which have been driving the human imagination from prehistoric times to the present day. Ever since we humans have existed on earth, we have created stories, symbols and signs to give form to our feelings, thoughts and knowledge, to leave traces in time and perhaps to connect with eternity.

We experience the miracle of reality through the senses of our body. This consists of the elements of exploding stars in space: the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood and the carbon in our cells. In fleeting moments, we connect with eternity and give traces of existence a material form. Art is one way of doing this.

I would like to thank Claudio Parmiggiani, Indigo and Mayo Bucher, the sons of Heidi Bucher, Toni R. Toivonen, Petra Noordkamp, the artists of the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective and Lawrence Malstaf, as well as the institutional lenders, Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Prof Dr Fabio Martini and Dr Lapo Baglioni of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”, the Natural History Museum Vienna, the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster, Nicolò Stabile, founder of the initiative Il Cretto è casa mia of the survivors of the earthquake in the town of Gibellina, as well as the photographer Giuseppe Ippolito, the VR creator Alberto Stabile and the writer Giovanna Giordano. I would like to thank the Italian Consulate General for its patronage. I would especially like to thank Prof Dr Andreas Mulch, Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, and Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt for a time of joint thinking and working.

Franziska Nori
Director Frankfurter Kunstverein