Irma Blank
1934–2023 · German-born Italian artist, pioneer of visual writing
Irma Blank (Celle, 1934 - Milan, 2023) was an artist born in Germany who settled in Italy for good in the mid-1950s. Her work, based on transcribing printed text in ink, has been described as drawing languages without words, a form of communication beyond any specific language. Her importance lies in bringing writing into the realm of the visual and the sonic.
In 1955, aged twenty and inspired by Goethe's Italian Journey, she travelled to Syracuse, Sicily. Deciding to stay, she worked as a high school teacher and devoted her nights to her own art. In 1973 she moved to Milan, where she met the concrete poets and began introducing language into her prints and paintings. In the same period she started a long-standing collaboration with the artist Mirella Bentivoglio.
Her Trascrizioni cycle (1973-1979) involved copying texts from newspapers, poetry and treatises in black ink on transparent paper. During the process she "read" the material in monotonous sounds with her mouth closed, and these sounds were recorded. Her work was shown at Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977 and at the Venice Biennale in 1978, but it then went through a period of relative obscurity until it was rediscovered and reappraised in the 2010s.
In 2017 she took part in the 57th Venice Biennale, and between 2019 and 2021 a travelling retrospective visited several cities in Europe and Israel. She died in Milan in April 2023, aged 88.](The text was truncated)