Irma Blank German, 1934-2023

Irma Blank was born in Celle, Germany, in 1934. In 1955, she moved to Sicily, where she held her first solo exhibition in Syracuse in 1965. She later settled in Milan, where she continued her artistic explorations for the rest of her life.

On paper, on canvas and in books, Blank developed a body of work that borrows the forms and structures of writing while freeing the sign from meaning. Her asemantic writings evoke texts without offering a language to decipher. Gesture, its duration and its repetition become the elements of a visual language that registers the presence of the body.

From the late 1960s onwards, the Eigenschriften, conceived as writing addressed to herself, take the form of pages covered in fine lines. Their variations and irregularities create a visual rhythm reminiscent of a text. The organisation of the page remains recognisable, yet the marks elude linguistic conventions. In the Avant-testo works, the gesture becomes denser and more agitated, lending a different intensity to this exploration of the origins of writing.

The bodily dimension of her work extends into sound and performance. In 1977, at Galleria Milano, she used a tape recorder to reproduce the sound of her gestures on the surface, an exploration she would call script music. In 1979, in a Roman bookshop, she gave a phonetic reading of her asemantic writings, lending a vocal presence to signs devoid of codified meaning.

With the Radical Writings, the relationship between writing and the body centres on breathing. The subtitle Schriftzug = Atemzug establishes an equivalence between the written stroke and the breath: the length of each line is determined by the duration of an exhalation. Each gesture thus becomes a measure of lived time, transforming the painted surface into a record of a vital rhythm.

Having participated in documenta 6 in 1977 and the Venice Biennale in 1978, Irma Blank returned to the latter in 2017. The retrospective Blank was presented at MAMCO in Geneva in 2019–2020, followed by CAPC in Bordeaux in 2020. Her works are held in collections including those of the Centre Pompidou, MAMCO and Museion in Bolzano. Irma Blank died in Milan in 2023.