When I first saw the fragments of the Pergamon Altar in Berlin, I was surprised and delighted that the negative space surrounding the sculpture fired up my imagination more than the artworks themselves. It felt that the culturally imagined images projected on the blank panels were more potent than the beautifully resolved frieze itself, which was a distinctly contemporary experience of appreciating an artwork at odds with the classical subject.  

The space between the statues also implied the violence of the original temple's fragmentation through time and colonial overtones of extracting the stones from Greece to Berlin. The vacuum between the fragments could also symbolise a chasm between the original use as elements of religious ceremony and of contemporary tourism.

In a certain way, this disorienting representation of the Greek Gods seems more truthful in the modern age: fragments of a lost world incongruous against the blank orthogonal moment that can never entirely discard the influence, imagery, and architecture of the classical past.