Lucie Fontaine is extremely proud to host a solo exhibition by German-born Milan-based artist Irma Blank. Entitled “Pink Writings,” the exhibition will open on April 8 from 6:30 to 10:00 pm and it will remain on view until June 6. On the occasion of Miart, Lucie Fontaine will be open on April 9, 10 and 11 from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. Afterwards the exhibition will remain on view by appointment only, contact number: +39.349.5385985.

Independent and detached from any movement or group for more than 40 years, Irma Blank has been working constantly on the relationship between art making and writing. Blank looks at handwriting, its relationship to performance and meditation, book making, and the notion of printed matter.

Working within just one series at a time, to which she is completely devoted, Blank has created unique bodies of work that pushes the boundaries of language, questioning the very foundations of communication. Her surgical acts are very simple yet capable of embracing the universal, the primal, and the spiritual.

“Pink Writings” is part of her “Radical Writings” series, executed by the artist between 1983 and 1986. Intimate, feminine and yet powerful, these works are created by the repetitive action of drawing a line with the use of a paintbrush soaked into pink watercolor. Through this very minimal act, Blank generates a series of marks that recalls disparate sources, from Arabic calligraphy to digital printing.

As Alberto Veca stated in his essay written in 1983 to accompany these works “In the deforming process between the individuality of the manuscript and its printing, there is, therefore, in the intermediate phase of connection, the re-appropriation of what was lost in transcription, with additions to the margin, the correction, the more profound reading of something apparently extraneous to oneself that, gradually, as the sound and rhythm of the sentence emerge, one recognizes as the pregnant figure of an action occurring in time which, after an interval of time, returns to its source.”

Irma Blank was born in Celle, Germany, in 1934. In 2014 her works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Mostyn in Llandudno, P420 in Bologna, Alison Jacques Gallery in London and Galerija Gregor Podnar in Berlin.