Betty Danon Turkish, 1927-2002

Born in Istanbul in 1927 as Beky Aluf, Betty Danon studied miniature painting before turning to jewellery and clothing design. She settled in Milan in 1956, where she developed an artistic practice combining collage, painting, writing and visual poetry.

Inspired by Jungian symbolism and Eastern philosophies, she initially explored the relationship between the circle and the square, seeking a progressive reduction of forms. This approach, articulated in her Dichiarazione di poetica in 1972, continued in around fifty “atonal paintings”, abstract works characterised by soft colours and a strong spiritual dimension. Their designation already signalled her interest in sound and music.

During the 1970s, Betty Danon reduced the circle and the square to the point and the line, which became the fundamental elements of her visual vocabulary. In her artist’s book Punto – linea (1976), she composed lines from the word “line”. Transposed onto musical staves, these explorations gave rise to asemantic scores in which signs form a silent musical language. With Migratory code (1978), she notably evoked her journey from Turkey to Italy through pattern rather than sound.

Her scores brought her international recognition, while her practice expanded into performance. At the 1978 Venice Biennale, she presented Memoria del segno sonoro: writing in invisible ink, she first brought her text into existence solely through the sound of the pen on paper, before revealing its signs in blue ink. The following year, she participated in the exhibition Sound at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. Moving between asemantic and automatic writing, she conceived of writing as an autonomous visual language, freed from its communicative function.

From the 1980s onwards, Betty Danon withdrew from the art world while continuing her experiments. She published artists’ books and developed a sustained Mail art practice, exchanging works with Irma Blank and Tomaso Binga, among others. In the 1990s, she began working with digital tools, giving rise to the series Computer poems (1991).

Betty Danon died in Milan in 2002. Her work has since been featured in group exhibitions at institutions including Museion in Bolzano (2019), the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2020) and Mudam Luxembourg (2024).