ART CITIES:N.York-Irma Blank

Working in a realm that is defined by the overlapping fields of painting, drawing and writing, Irma Blank has built an œuvre that concentrates on the relationship between written and visual languages. In her experiments the artist investigates a stage prior to written language where signs are simply visual elements. Blank’s work is strongly influenced by the conflation of writing and image as practiced in the concrete poetry of the 70s. But Blank neglected the word as such, directing her attention, with an obsessive and rigorous immersion, solely to the visual aspects of writing.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: P420 Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Painting Between the Lines” comprises selections from key bodies of work representing the long, prolific, and deeply poetic career of Irma Blank: the “Eigenschriften” (1968-1973), “Trascrizioni” (1973-1979), “Radical Writings” (1983-1995), “Avant-testo” (1990s-early 2000s), and “Gehen” (2017-ongoing). Since the 1960s, Blank’s oeuvre has existed in the space between language and gesture, unfolding over six decades as a solitary journey into the complex relationship of writing, art, and life. In each body of work, she investigates the ways in which a sign or a mark can represent a feeling, an idea, or the experience of time. Irma Blank began to explore the intersections of linguistic and visual representation in the late 1960’s. Practicing at the same time as conceptual artists such as Mel Bochner, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, Blank began investigating the various possibilities through which a sign could represent existence. Her desire was to record time and create a form of writing not related to knowledge but to being, stripped of meaning and imbued with new values. “Eigenschriften” are some of Blank’s earliest works, composed of dense scriptural signs recording the artist’s mental state at a distinct point in time. The “Trascrizioni” series are reductions of pre-existing texts, tracings of the typographic layouts of poetry, newspapers and books from which they were taken. In “Radical Writings” Blank links her breathing to the gesture of writing, repeating a single action: drawing a line corresponding to one single breath, Blank more clearly tackled time as a physical gesture in paintings of intense pink (the color of individuation, orientation, analysis, and expectation) or ultramarine blue (decisive, authoritative…It is the color of ink, of infinity, of utopia). These works reference the familiar sight of an open book, with every line expressing the pattern of the artist’s inhalation and exhalation as she traced a mark from her body to the outer frontier of the canvas. While the gesture of the “Radical Writings” articulates a long horizontal breath, the gesture of the “Avant-testo” series, , begun in the late 1990s and completed in the early 2000s,  is chaotic and convulsive, recalling a primordial sign free of structure and purely about action. Clutching a bundle of ballpoint pens the artist traces signs with rotary movements coming from and returning to the body. The end result is a dense, saturated and impenetrable surface that only becomes transparent at the very edge, offering the viewer a small glimpse of her process. Lastly, the exhibition illustrates examples from the “Gehen”, series, which she started in 2017. “Gehen”, which means “go” functions as an idea of a second life, a renewed perspective on movement and the body as her own shifts through time. Through her unique democratization of language, Blank liberates the viewer to experience fundamentals of human connection.

Info: Luxembourg & Dayan, 64 East 77 Street, New York, Duration: 2/5-3/7/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, www.luxembourgdayan.com