Artist: Irma Blank

On the occasion of Zurich Art Weekend, Mai 36 Galerie presents Being Here, the second solo exhibition by Irma Blank.

Irma Blank was born in Northern Germany (Celle) in 1934 and passed away in 2023 in Milan, at the age of eighty-eight. Passionate about literature and language, she moved to Sicily in 1955 after meeting her Italian husband — a move that uprooted her and became the foundation of her work. A stranger to the language around her, she taught drawing at a local high school by day and made art at night, working alone in her studio. The distance between two countries and two languages led her to a realisation: there is no such thing as the right word. Rather than filling the page with meaning, she empties it, replacing legible words with drawn lines that look like writing but resist being read. "I try to retrieve the space of silence, the unsaid."

As a woman building an artistic practice in postwar Italy, she developed her work slowly, privately, on her own terms. Working in solitude, she grew acutely attuned to the physical act of mark-making: the sound of her breath, the scratch of a pen on paper. The result is something deeply physical: writing as a form of presence, of being here, of marking time.

Her first series, Eigenschriften (1968–1973), meaning "self-writings", was an intimate exploration of the act of writing without words and a practice of self-reflection. These intimate works gave way to Trascrizioni (1973–1979), in which Blank copied the typographic layouts of newspapers, novels, and poetry books, transposing their visual rhythms while stripping away all content and emphasizing its mechanical forms, reflecting mass communication. In the Radical Writings series (early 1980s–mid-1990s), the meditative nature of Irma Blank’s practice is enhanced, the breath becomes the unit of measurement. Blank literally paints "in one breath", with absolute concentration and without hesitation. Each band of colour (first in rose and rose-violet, later she turned to blue) has the length of one breath, from left to right, from beginning to end, from emptiness to fullness. Writing is breathing, painting is breathing, working is living.

Horizont (2007) is a series of diptychs arranged as a single, continuous work. Across the wall, the panels build a horizon. The spacing between each surface is as deliberate as the script itself. Emptiness is not absence here; it is part of the composition. Blank returns to an early, embodied form of writing. Through a two-handed rotary movement, the body inscribes itself into the work. The result is not legible script but a dense, vibrating web of signs, alive with rhythm.

What unfolds over 50 years of Irma Blank’s practice is a kind of universal writing, that belongs to no single language and therefore, in a sense, to all of them. Her works are both spiritual expression and physical experience. Blank’s notations are ultimately a means of recording and at the same time result from existential connection between life and work.

Irma Blank’s exhibition history includes numerous solo shows at renowned institutions such as: Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan, 1984; Artothek, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, 1989; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 1992; Mostyn Museum, Llandudno, 2014; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Bolzano, 2017; Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv 2020; MAMCO, Genève, 2019; Museo Villa Dei Cedri, Bellinzona, 2021; Fondazione ICA Milano, 2022. She has also participated in group exhibitions at Palazzo della Ragione, Mantova, 1998; Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Città di Castello, 2011; Salon für Kunstbuch, Vienna, 2015; FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milano, 2019; Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, València, 2020; S.M.A.K., Gent, 2022.

Blank has been part of Documenta 6, Kassel, 1977 and the 57 Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2017.