Gallery invites you to pay £8 a ticket not to see invisible artworks

A leading gallery is to push the boundaries of visual art with an exhibition of works which cannot be seen.

London’s Hayward Gallery will gather together 50 “invisible” works by leading figures such as Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and Yoko Ono for its display of works you cannot actually see.

It is thought to be the first such exhibition staged at a major institution in the UK.

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Gallery bosses say the £8 a head exhibition demonstrates how art is about “firing the imagination”, rather than simply viewing objects.

Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957 - 2012 opens on June 12 and includes an empty plinth, a canvas of invisible ink and an unseen labyrinth.

It includes work and documents from French artist Klein who pioneered invisible works in the late 1950s with “architecture of air”.

Also in the exhibition will be Warhol’s work Invisible Sculpture – dating from 1985 – which consists of an empty plinth, on which he had once briefly stepped.

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Another, 1000 Hours of Staring is a blank piece of paper at which artist Tom Friedman has stared repeatedly over the space of five years, and another by the same artist Untitled (A Curse) is an empty space cursed by a witch.

Also featured will be a series of typed instructions by Ono encouraging viewers to conjure up an artwork in their minds, Jeppe Heine’s Invisible Labyrinth in which visitors negotiate their way around a maze in digital headphones activated by beams.

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