Irma Blank's works on display at the ICA Milan Foundation

It is a retrospective of the last two decades of Blank’s work, the exhibition of German-Italian artist Irma Blank (Celle, Germany, 1934) curated by Johana Carrier and Joana P. R. Neves, on view at the ICA Milan Foundation from June 9 to July 7, 2022. The exhibition is part of an itinerary that includes seven iterations, each oriented to delve into one side of the artist’s production and adapted to the relevant venue. The culmination of the traveling exhibition is the final chapter at Fondazione ICA in Milan, a particularly important destination as the city where the artist has lived and worked since 1973. This latest exhibition thus associates the universal instance of his work with deeply personal aspects.

The works chosen for the exhibition focus on identity and critical self-reflection through the use of drawn and wordless languages, characteristic of the artist’s entire ouvre. With this approach, Blank’s work thus creates and proposes a form of communication that goes beyond specific language. Passionate about literature and language, Irma Blank moved to Sicily in 1955 from her home country of Germany. This geographical, cultural and linguistic uprooting forms the basis of her work. Realizing, therefore, that “there is no right word in the world,” Blank began work on an early series of introspective works, Eigenschriften (’self-writings’, 1968-1973), which represents the beginning of a lifelong artistic quest based on invented calligraphies stripped of the obligations of meaning. This practice is technically called “asemic or asemantic writing,” a universal form of expression on the border between writing and drawing.

Even the materials used by the artist reflect this association, evoked in her use of crayons and ink as much as when she uses ballpoint pens and paint. Blank’s radical creativity also leads her to work not only with painting and drawing but also with very different media including silkscreen, sound, performance and installation. Irma Blank’s work is thus developed in cycles of works. Through each of them, the artist devotes herself to a different aspect of the asemantic method created, approaching it with serene discipline. In 1973 Blank began the series Transcriptions (1973-1979), based on daily readings such as newspapers and poems of which the artist transcribes a few pages with her own intuitive handwriting, copying with ink on paper the layout of the text rather than letters, words and sentences. After Transcriptions, the artist devoted himself to other cycles such as Radical Writings (1983-1996), perhaps his best-known series. At the turn of the century, Blank began the longest and most multifaceted cycle of his own work, Global Writings (2000-2016), through which he continued to develop a “universal” form of writing through the use of an alphabet consisting of eight silent letters, all consonants except one, the “j” with which he constructs text-drawings, or through the use of computers with which he creates overlays of texts silkscreened on canvas or aluminum.

Following a health problem and the subsequent paralysis of the right side of his body, the artistlearned to work with his left hand and created the Gehen series. Second Life (2017-2019). At this stage his work is transformed, focusing on the production of horizontal lines that cross the paper as if the lines of the notebook merged with the written word. More recent, on the other hand, and exhibited here for the first time, are the body of work entitled Ways (2020- 2021) and the handmade book My Way (2020), where carefully drawn lines are concentrated in the center of the page.

The Milan retrospective restores the research pursued by the artist over the past two decades, making room for rarely exhibited or previously unseen works alongside works made in the 1970s from the Eigenschriften and Transcriptions series. The exhibition also highlights the performative aspect of Blank’s work, which is present throughout his oeuvre, including the live reenactmentof the performance Concerto Scritturale (originally made in 1981 and presented at the opening of the exhibition in Fondazione ICA Milano), video documentation of two performances and some recorded sounds.

Inviting the visitor to delve into the artist’s spiritual quest, the works in the exhibition intend to evoke a path ofreflection focused on the written and spoken word. Starting from her own experiences of migration and isolation, Irma Blank explores a form of interpersonal communication that passes through the passage of time and the repetition of the sign, imprinted in paper or on stainless steel. Her research is conveyed to the viewer as a method rather than a lesson, as a passion for silence and spiritual communication.

The BLANK exhibition is a collaboration with Culturgest, Lisbon; Mamco, Geneva; CCA, Tel Aviv; Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona; Bombas Gens, Valencia; and Fondazione ICA, Milan.

A monographic book has been produced for the occasion, published by Koenig Books, which delves into the exhibition project and its various declinations.

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Irma Blank's works on display at the ICA Milan Foundation

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