Horror vacui
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
In visual art, Horror Vacui (literally a fear of empty spaces) is the filling of the entire canvas/space/medium with ornamental details, figures, shapes, lines and anything else the artist might envision. It may be considered the opposite of minimalism.
Many examples of horror vacui come from or are influenced by the mentally unstable and inmates of psychiatric hospitals, and fall under the category of Outsider Art. The term is associated with the Italian critic and scholar Mario Praz, who used it to describe the suffocating atmosphere and clutter of interior design in the Victorian age. Older examples can be seen on Barbaric objects such as the Viking ship at Sutton Hoo or the Ruthwell Cross.
Horror Vacui may have also had an impact, consciously or unconsciously, on graphic design by artists like David Carson, Vaughan Oliver and tomato (http://www.tomato.co.uk/home.html) and in the underground comix movement in the work of S. Clay Wilson, Robert Crumb and Robert Williams .es:Horror vacui nl:Horror vacui
