Group exhibition

NOTHING TO READ

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Irma Blank, Alighiero Boetti and others

Works by fourteen artists treating writing as gesture and mark rather than legible text, from invented scripts to torn posters and counted numbers.

This group show treats writing as material, not message, turning letters into line, gesture and rhythm. Irma Blank, Mirtha Dermisache, Betty Danon and Henri Michaux produce invented scripts that stay illegible, what critic Gillo Dorfles termed Blank’s “asemantic writing.”

Alighiero Boetti’s obsessive handwork echoes that discipline, while On Kawara and Roman Opałka record dates and numbers as traces of time passed. Glenn Ligon layers repeated text into image, and Mimmo Rotella’s torn posters leave only fragments of lettering.

Full details at mitterrand.com