Reconstructed Paintings
A spatial sketch that treats Hammershøi’s paintings as evidence for reconstructing the rooms beyond their frames.
- Period
- 2013
- Status
- Complete / Archived
- Form
- Spatial reconstruction sketch
sunlit roomThe project
A spatial sketch built from Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings of his home. Repeated views of its rooms and courtyard provide evidence for reconstructing the depicted architecture and testing each painting’s spatial coherence, implied field of view, and equivalent camera lens.
I wanted to see how image-based modeling would behave when its source was a painting. Hammershøi often returned to the rooms and courtyard of his own home, painting the same spaces from different positions. Those repeated views provide enough evidence to infer the space beyond each frame. Reconstructing the courtyard became a way to inspect the painting’s internal logic: how the architecture holds together and what field of view or equivalent lens might have produced the image. It remains a sketch, and that looseness suits the experiment. I am trying to understand the space inside a painting by building it.
courtyard reconstruction
My role
I made the reconstructions as an experiment in image-based modeling.
Selected credits
- Alexander Porter
- Artist