Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960–2022)

With Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960–2022) the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum shows a representative selection of international positions dedicated to the blank book as an artistic medium. The number of 259 artists’ books on display, among others by Michael Asher, Luciano Bartolini, Irma Blank, Marcel Broodthaers, Ulises Carrión, Olafur Eliasson, Ryan Gander, Dora Garcia, Martin Kippenberger, Sara MacKillop, Piero Manzoni, Bruce Nauman, Olaf Nicolai, Ed Ruscha, Simon Starling, and Heimo Zobernig refers to the legendary exhibition Book as Artwork 1960/72 curated by Germano Celant and Lynda Morris, but the selection focuses exclusively on the qualities of blank, raw, illegible, empty, unprinted, tautological, hermetic, dysfunctional, and mysterious.

Curated by curator, editor, and collector Moritz Küng, the exhibition explores how contemporary artists and artist collectives exploit and activate the conceptual potential of a blank sheet of paper or a book with empty pages for their artistic practice. In the process, the empty, non-existent, and invisible become meaningful, and the refusal of legibility in the conventional sense becomes a telling statement. A seemingly absent content reveals a multitude of unexpected perspectives on conventions of communication and themes of speechlessness, origin, and disappearance. Starting with a significant exploration by artist Herman de Vries of the designation of the color white, the exhibition opens up the diversity of artistic concepts in reflecting on emptiness, purity, and raw material in relation to the formal and functional criteria of books in 15 chapters, the headings of each of which are taken from one of their book titles.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog published by Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln, with details of the works, references and illustrations of all the books exhibited. The catalog book Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960–2022) is dedicated to the artistic phenomenon of blank books in an international context since 1960. The concept of making the empty, the illegible, and the non-imageable the content of books, which runs counter to the conventional understanding of the function and content of a book, has developed a rich artistic practice with diverse aspects. It reveals that communication and language consist of negotiation, agreement, refusal, and difference, work with humor, irony, and also speechlessness, and deal with beginnings and endings, imagination and reference, freedom of expression and censorship.

Catalog ed. by Moritz Küng. Düren (Germany): Leopold-Hoesch-Museum. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln, 2023. 448 pages, 28 × 20 cm. Graphic design by arc, Berlin. Softcover with flaps, reversed „Fälzel“ stitch bound. Offset printed with 535 full color illustrations. Edition of 1,100 copies. ISBN: 978-3-7533-0463-2.

The exhibition and catalog project is generously supported by Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Fondation Jan Michalski, AC/E Acción Cultural Española, Museumsverein Düren e.V. and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.