The Sound of Drawing–Graphic Explorations of Language in Art–A Sonic Voyage into Irma Blank's Meditative Art

Contemporary drawing is one of art's best kept secrets: associated with sound, language and writing, it turns contemporary art into a meditative form of art-making engaging the spectator in a poetic and existential voyage.

Led by Blank's discovery of sound within the daily practice of drawing, this episode is a sonic wandering and a philosophical exploration of the artist's work, engaging with recent technological changes. How can a minimal and poetic practice face such specific issues? What is the role of the artist facing a global net of information which connects us as much as it separates us? And what is the value of communication – and of silence? Irma Blank has taught me that and much more.

The avant-gardes of the 1960s–70s were proliferous in innovative and minimal methods of creativity engaging the breath, the whole body and graphic deconstructions of language. Irma Blank was one of those artists with a subversive take on traditional artistic languages.

Have you ever wondered how artists and curators work together? This episode muses upon the relation between me, a young-ish curator and the artist Irma Blank, who'd reached the age of 80 when we met, along with my co-curator Johana Carrier.

This episode is an excerpt of a lecture given by me on the 3rd of February  2025 at ABK Stuttgart whose title was "The Paper is Impatient", under the invitation of the drawing department, and their teachers Katrin Ströbel and Hanna Hennenkemper.

The « drawing sounds » are excerpts of Irma Blank’s recordings of the sound of each series. For Radical Writings, she recorded herself, breathing in and out, because that was the basis of the image’s structure.

Music by Sarturn.

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For more information about the artist visit her gallery's website: P420, Bologna, Italy.

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If you enjoy Katy Hessel's The Great Women Artists Podcast, this episode is for you. It is centred around the artistic practice of female German artist Irma Blank, who never stopped producing her art, whether it was shown in prestigious events such as the Venice Biennale in 1977, or it wasn't, like when her Radical Writings on canvas were deemed a form of yielding to the 80s trend of the return to painting... whereas Blank was, on the contrary, more militant than ever for her elemental forms of the line and the minimal gesture by deeply engaging with the meditative breath in relation to the line and the colour blue, which for her represented infinity. Blank passed away in 2023, leaving a potent body of work whose incredible energy leaves no spectator or curator indifferent.