A fear or dislike of leaving empty spaces, especially in an artistic composition.
‘Making a virtue out of necessity, he filled up the wall space, guided by a joyous horror vacui.’
‘Overarching tree leaves take care of the horror vacui.’
‘And yet, for groups as diverse as the Frankfurt School and the College of Sociology, this flirtation was a progressive form of horror vacui with regard to spaces that fascism had previously monopolized for its own ends.’
‘Kahn seems at once to have a horror vacui, for which he compensates with microcosmic, allover, one-brushstroke-at-a-time execution, painting every blade of grass, or - almost, it seems every thread in the carpet.’
‘Lush painterly abstraction erupts at the upper right, while the rest of the painting is a horror vacui of scrambled imagery that now, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, looks sickeningly realistic.’
‘But the horror vacui in Brown's paintings is barely counterbalanced by her grudging inclination to create space within them.’
‘Some represent a true horror vacui, with heavy antebellum ornamentation of blade, hilt and scabbard.’
‘They need to fill the space, it's a kind of horror vacui.’
‘As if suffering from horror vacui, Grant covers the shaped supports with densely packed words and images, mostly hand-drawn in black and white and loosely relating to the governing silhouette.’
‘Their allover patterns also owe something to '70s Pattern and Decoration, something to Islamic motifs, to mosaics, something to horror vacui.’
‘One of the Seattle-based artists Hodges shows is Alfredo Arreguin, a native of Mexico whose prints and paintings combine a remarkable luminosity with a case of horror vacui.’
‘After introducing the concept of horror vacui, my third-graders created their own version of this belief.’
Origen
Modern Latin, ‘horror of a vacuum’.
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