Between sign and silence, Irma Blank's art on display at Miradolo Castle

From Oct. 14 to Nov. 26, 2023, Miradolo Castle in San Secondo di Pinerolo (Turin, Italy) is dedicating an exhibition to Irma Blank (Celle, 1934 - Milan, 2023), a long-forgotten artist who passed away a few months ago and who transformed writing into sign. The Cosso Foundation, which for the occasion inaugurates its new atempo exhibition format, presents in this exhibition (titled Irma Blank. Tra segno e silenzio) twenty works, including seven never before exhibited, from important private collections and thanks to the collaboration with Bologna’s P420 Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Roberto Galimberti, with coordination by Paola Eynard and iconographic consulting by Enrica Melossi.

Three thematic nuclei in dialogue with each other trace the sequence of Irma Blank’s different cycles of work from the late 1960s to 2023: the works, made with different techniques - oil on transparent paper, ballpoint pen on polyester on wooden frame, oil on canvas, silkscreen on canvas (unique specimen), marker on transparent paper, ink on parchment paper, pastel on paper - three artist’s books, including UR-BUCH Blue Novel, a body of blue tissue paper sheets “that refers,” Irma Blank explains, “to all the ink spilled over the centuries and opens to the immensity of spaces, to infinity,” and photographic and video documentation.

Four historic rooms of Miradolo Castle relate to the works on display, visually interacting between stratigraphy, decorations, pastel frescoes on the ceilings and the signs of a past that becomes present. Each room of the exhibition is ideally linked to Irma Blank’s words that inspire an infinitive verb: to look, to do, to listen, to go, the definition of which, taken from the Treccani Vocabulary, suggests some possible declinations and relationships between Irma Blank’s works, the Cosso Foundation and its souls, and Miradolo Castle and its history.

Irma Blank’s poetic researches, in over fifty years of work, subtend the assiduous, constant, tenacious attempt to free writing from the slavery of meaning, restoring autonomy to the pure sign. Writing relates with an inevitable communicative tension both when it takes the form of a text intended for the reading of another, and when it becomes a diary page or personal note, in which the other becomes the writer himself. The action of stopping on the page (and in time) the word makes the reader, even when he or she is only hypothetical, not solely a spectator or user but an interpreter and author of the word itself. Irma Blank’s asemantic writing, as in Gillo Dorfles’ definition, does not exclude the reader or the reader but seeks, with them, an even deeper intimate dialogue of relationship and discovery. Of listening and silence.

Since the beginning of her career, Irma Blank’s work has been structured by a series of works of a path of absolute coherence. Beginning with a circumscribed core of themes and questions, each cycle fades out and ties in with subsequent ones in a fluid and natural progression. Papers, sheets, canvases, books are the surfaces on which the relationship between sign and time is played out. Ink, India ink, ballpoint pen, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, are the tools through which signs occupy these surfaces and surfaces record the time of an existence through gesture.

Although in different ways and meanings, reference to writing and the space of the book are present from the earliest series of work to the present. What changes over the years and between the different cycles of work is the character and intensity of this relationship, which oscillates between the early reference of the Eigenschriften to the mimicry of the Transcriptions, from the complete abstractionism of the Avant-Texts with their primordial non-writing, to the babelic writing of the most recent Hyper-Texts. His latest works are entitled Gehen (to go) because, as the artist says, “we are always inside our making, in time.”

Imagining time in making is the ideal link between the Cosso Foundation and the work of Irma Blank, whose writing is, at once, an inner mirror and an opening to the world. A cultural project is, similarly, listening and caring, looking in and looking out, writing a piece of a story with the hope that it may turn into a shared memory, to the future.

The exhibition is accompanied by a never-before-seen sound installation curated by the art project Avant-dernière pensée, dedicated to Maurice Ravel’s Concerto in D major for Piano and Orchestra "for the Left Hand," which runs throughout the exhibition. The Concerto was commissioned from the composer by Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, brother of philosopher Ludwig, who lost his right arm in World War I and performed it, for the first time, in Vienna in 1931.

Parallel to the exhibition, then, is the project From a meter down: an educational path for visitors of all ages to learn, with the tools of play, how to observe works of art and the reality around us.

The exhibition can be visited on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Tickets: 15 euros full, 12 euros reduced (groups, over 65s, conventions), 10 euros reduced 15-26 years, 8 euros reduced 6-14 years, free (0-5 years, Museum Subscribers and Torino+Piemonte Card, Cultural Passport, disabled and accompanying persons), 5 euros Carta Giovani Città di Pinerolo, 4 euros reduced schools.

Information: 0121 502761 prenotazioni@fondazionecosso.it www.fondazionecosso.com

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Between sign and silence, Irma Blank's art on display at Miradolo Castle

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