Mai 36 Gallery announces the death of Irma Blank

“I think we are inside our doing, through our body, in time. Time accompanies us, but we also accompany time, and as we proceed every occurrence, including errors, finds its balance, until life coincides with a path of signs, a road that goes from the beginning to the end” - Blank

“We have lost a graceful, radical artist and wonderful person” - Victor Gisler, Mai 36

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Irma Blank was a passionate reader and lover of language.

Born in 1934 in Northern Germany, she met her Italian husband in 1955 and moved to Sicily. The gap between the two countries and the two languages was immense - it led her to question the adequacy or rather the inadequacy of any language. She then realized “that there’s no such thing as the right word” - even in one’s mother tongue - to really convey meaning/feeling.

Blank’s entire body of work is based on language and therefore literature - whether emptying books from their meaning or creating a new form of nonverbal, asemantic writing, for instance by creating drawings that mimick the layout of existing books/newspapers or using a utopian alphabet.

Her work was the result of a matured conceptuality, asserting itself in the corporality of production and engaging with a utopic community of hypothetical readers, while also in its nature, a soliloquy.

photo: Maria Mulas