WRITTEN ART COLLECTION

Artists

Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan’s visual works feature suns, moons and luminous colors. Her roots as a writer and artist are Lebanese; she grew up in Arab Beirut with Greek and Turkish as her first languages. Her poetry is clear and haunting; it is also political. The texts in her fold-outs stand for what can be said – but she anchors the written words in the inexpressible domain of bright colors. She studied at the Sorbonne, Berkeley and Harvard, which is why she writes in Arabic, French and English. For a long time she lived in Sausalito, California, where she also began to paint.

Etel Adnan (b. 1925 in Beirut, LB, d. 2021 in Paris, FR) grew up multilingually with Greek and Turkish as her native languages. She attended French schools in Beirut and began studying philosophy, continuing at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1949 and at the University of California Berkeley and Harvard University from 1955. From 1958, she taught philosophy at the Dominican College of California in San Rafael, meanwhile beginning her first art works: abstract drawings with pastels and landscape paintings. Adnan’s hallmark medium of expression became Leporellos, meter-long folding books originating from Japan, in which she combined poetry and painting, writing and drawing. In 1972, Etel Adnan met the artist Simone Fattal (b. 1942 in Damascus, Syria); from the 1980s onward, they lived together in California and France. As a writer and artist, the movement between different languages and cultures shaped Adnan’s lifework. Her works have been shown at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); and the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). Solo exhibitions have been held at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2014); the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2015); the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2022); and the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2023).

More about Etel Adnan
Kalimat
Kalimat 2012

Malileh Afnan

Maliheh Afnan (b. 1935 in Haifa, PS, d. 2016 in London, GB), the daughter of Iranian parents, grew up in Beirut where the family had fled after the founding of Israel in 1948. She began studying sociology and psychology at the American University of Beirut, before graduating from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, DC, in 1962. Growing up in multilingual surroundings—Arabic, English, Hebrew—played a central role in the evolution of her work; even as a child Afnan had already begun to invent her own scripts inspired by Arabic, Persian, and Latin alphabets. Her artistic practice included drawings, embroideries, and reliefs. They are characterized by pictorial layers of lines and pigment on paper or textiles with calligraphic elements that recall weathered manuscripts or archaeological maps. She used them in combination with imaginary scripts or her own invented language of signs, not to communicate specific messages directly but to express a universal, indecipherable visual language that communicates between cultures, times, and memories. From the 1960s onward, Afnan lived and worked in Kuwait and Paris, among other places, and from 1997 in London. Afnan’s works have been exhibited at the British Museum, London (1991, 1995, 2006); the Hermitage, St. Petersburg (2007); the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2009); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2024).

© Philipp Ottendörfer

Mounira Al Solh

Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978 in Beirut, LB) lives and works between Beirut and Amsterdam. She grew up in Lebanon during the civil war and emigrated with her family to Damascus, Syria, in 1989. She studied painting at the Lebanese University in Beirut (1998–2001) and fine art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (2003–2006). Her work includes video (installations), paintings and drawings, texts, embroideries, and performance works, with which she repeatedly explores the form and function of language. Al Solh uses wordplay, multilingual texts, and embroideries to shift meanings. Her works unite feminist perspectives, micro-histories, and testimonies of war, flight, and trauma and are as poetic as they are socially engaged. Al Solh’s work has been presented at the Venice Biennale (2007, 2015) and at documenta 14 (2017); in 2024, she exhibited in the Lebanese Pavillon at the 60th Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at, among others, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014); the Art Institute of Chicago (2018); and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2020). Since the winter semester 2021/22, she has been Professor for Performance, Installation, and Media at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.

© Philipp Ottendörfer

Khaled Al-Saai

Khaled Al-Saai (b. 1970 in Homs, SY) lives and works between Beirut and the USA. He grew up in a family with a rich tradition of calligraphers. As a child, he learned classical Arabic writing styles and from 1989 onward studied calligraphy and painting at the University of Damascus and art history at the University of Aleppo, with subsequent study trips to Istanbul and Tehran, focusing on Ottoman and Persian calligraphy. Al-Saai’s work combines classical Arabic calligraphy with contemporary painting. His usually large-format pictures are composed rhythmically and dissolve script into abstract, overlapping color planes. Several works recall landscapes, others cosmic explosions in which letters seem like visual energy. For Al-Saai, language does not simply convey meaning but also expresses spirituality, movement, and music. The recognizable written symbols are either from poems or the Quran. In some cases, they lose their clear legibility—in favor of pure form and communicating emotions. He has received numerous awards for his calligraphy, such as those of the IRCICA, Istanbul (2007) and the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial (2004, 2008). His works have been presented in exhibitions at the Institut du monde arabe, Paris (2001), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2005), and the Sharjah Art Museum (2007).

Karel Appel

Karel Appel (b. 1921 in Amsterdam, NL, d. 2006 in Zurich, CH) was one of the co-founders of the CoBrA artists’ group. He studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (1940–43), where he had to conform to academic realism, which he questioned early on. From 1948 onward, the members of the CoBrA group advocated a spontaneous, anti-academic art practice—influenced by children’s drawings, folk art, and Art brut. Appel’s paintings are distinguished by powerful colors, rough contours, raw materials, and a gestural energy. In addition to paintings, he created sculptures, wall reliefs, assemblages, stage designs, and ceramics. For Appel, writing and language are not so much a means to convey semantic messages than rhythmic, visual elements. In some works, one encounters a sign-like gestural expression of emotional impulse, which also reflects the immediate physicality of his painting. Appel’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale (1954), II. documenta (1959), and in large retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1968), the Centre Pompidou Paris (1989), and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (2016).

Siah Armajani

Already as a teenager, when he was still living in Iran, Siah Armajani (1939 – 2020) worked as a calligrapher and draftsman. ›Panje Tan,‹ a work in Indian ink, means ›The Five.‹ It stands for the Prophet of Islam and his family. As a Christian from an educated and affluent family, Armajani fled Iran in 1960 and settled in the United States, where he developed into a conceptual artist and an influential architect of public art. In 2018/19, he was honored with museum retrospectives in his hometown of Minneapolis and in New York.

Panje Tan (Detail)
Panje Tan (Detail) 1960

Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti or Alighiero e Boetti (1940 – 1994) was an important initiator of the ›Arte povera‹ movement. In 1968 he used a photo to convey the idea that he himself was a twin. As of 1971, he had ordered embroidered maps with the title ›Mappa‹ to be produced in Afghanistan and later in Pakistan. Initially he was concerned with war zones, then ›Territori occupati.‹ He created a large amount of maps of the world featuring state borders and national flags. More and more, embroiderers were to decide for themselves which colors and fonts to use.

Mappa
Mappa 1980
© Philipp Ottendörfer

Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle (b. 1953 in Paris, FR) lives and works in Paris. She began studying social sciences before turning to photography, performance, and installation as a self-taught artist, and integrating texts into her works. At the end of the 1970s, she developed an artistic practice uniquely her own, observing and documenting strangers, which became a core element of her art. Calle’s works are often based on autobiographical or voyeuristic elements with which she documents herself, other people, and intimate or uncomfortable situations. In a poetic, conceptual way, she examines the relationship of privacy and publicness, intimacy and distance, and the human desire for voyeurism and sensation. The texts accompanying her photographs not only explain but also create additional levels of meaning. Through diary entries, interviews, letters, and observations, she integrates widely disparate narrative structures that address emotional, societal, and existential themes. Calle exhibited in the French Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Her works have been seen in solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); and the Musée Picasso, Paris (2023), among others.

Claudia Comte

Claudia Comte (b. 1983 in Grancy, CH) lives in the Canton Basel-County. She studied at the École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne and, after living in Paris, Rome, and Berlin, decided to live in a place in harmony with nature, crafts, and a sustainable artistic practice. Comte’s work includes sculpture, painting, and installation. The point of departure for many of her works is a system of rules she developed herself for the serial arrangement of organic form that uses rhythm, repetition, and patterns as structural principles. Comte found early inspiration in comics—such as the iconic cacti in Lucky Luke and the expressive depiction of nature in Marsupilami. She translates these cartoon-like biomorphisms into monumental wall works and sculptural ensembles composed of stylized, synthetic wavy lines. Writing occasionally appears as a visual element in Comte’s work. In her Interview Paintings (2020–21), she transcribed conversations with twelve international curators into visual fields in which fragments of their dialogue crisscross in graphic patterns over pastel-colored planes. Comte’s works have been exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Luzern (2017); the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2019); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2022); the Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai (2024); K&L Museum, Seoul (2024); and in the Desert X AlUla Festival in Saudi Arabia (2022).

Natalie Czech

Natalie Czech (born 1976 in Neuss) combines language, image, and poetic structure in her conceptual photography. In series such as Poems by Repetition, she works with found texts that she stages photographically, reworks, and transforms into visual poems. Through markings, erasures, or highlights, she creates dynamic interactions between reading and seeing. Her works explore questions of perception, repetition, and the relationship between medium and meaning. Czech uses the photographic image as a stage for linguistic condensation—showing that every poem can also be an image, and every image a poem. Her works are held in museum collections including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Fotomuseum Winterthur; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Germany. Solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions such as the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Kunstverein Heilbronn; KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; CRAC Alsace Centre d’Art; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunstverein Hamburg; and Ludlow 38, New York. Since 2020, Natalie Czech has been Professor of Photography at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. She lives and works in Berlin.

Lalla Essaydi

Lalla Essaydi (born 1956 in Marrakesh) is a Moroccan-born artist who lives in New York and works between Boston and Morocco. In her photography, paintings, installations, and films, she weaves together personal memories with reflections on the cultural, social, and political realities of her background. Raised in a privileged Muslim family, Essaydi lived in Paris and Saudi Arabia before studying painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and later earning a BFA (1999) and MFA (2003) in painting and photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. Her work critically engages with Western Orientalism and cultural stereotypes, especially in the representation of Arab women. In series such as Les Femmes du Maroc and Converging Territories (since the early 2000s), she stages women in calligraphically inscribed garments and interiors, using henna—a medium traditionally associated with women—to create visually sumptuous yet subversive explorations of gender, representation, and power. Essaydi’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C. (2015), the San Diego Museum of Art (2017), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., and are represented in numerous major U.S. museum collections.

Golnaz Fathi

After completing studies in graphic design at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran, Golnaz Fathi (b. 1972 in Teheran, IR) trained in traditional Persian calligraphy and in 1995 was named Best Woman Calligraphist by the Iranian Society of Calligraphy. In large-format paintings and ink works on paper, Fathi combines traditional and contemporary elements, calligraphy, abstract written characters, and gestures. Her works are inspired by Abstract Expressionism as well as by artists from Iran and the Middle East who began in the late 1950s and early 1960s to employ the written word as a pictorial element. In her more recent works, Fathi also integrates elements of an urban graffiti aesthetic: spray paint, scratches, and overwriting as a conscious reference to the street art of Tehran and her own variation on “calligraffiti.” Fathi’s works have been shown at International Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial (2010); the Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York (2022); and the October Gallery, London (2023). They are found in important collections internationally, including: the British Museum in London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia; Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore; Denver Art Museum; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; and the Farjam Foundation, Dubai.

Sam Francis

Sam Francis (1923 – 1994) studied painting in San Francisco and subsequently went to Paris. There he broke away from extensive, monochrome works in favor of islands of color. Inspired by trips to Japan, he developed his idiosyncratic gestural, spontaneous dripping technique, resulting in delicate textures. Due to his affiliation with abstract expressionism, tachism and Japanese calligraphy, he played an important role mediating between the art of the West and the Far East from the mid-1950s on.

Untitled
Untitled 1957

Karl Otto Götz

Karl Otto Götz (*1914 in Aachen, Germany; †2017 in Niederbreitbach, Germany) is regarded as one of the most important representatives of the German postwar avant-garde. After early self-taught works and a discontinued course of study at the School of Arts and Crafts in Aachen, he studied for one semester at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden before serving as a communications officer in Norway in 1941. As early as 1947, a British cultural protection officer arranged a solo exhibition for him in a Paris gallery. This led, in 1949, to his membership in the CoBrA group, founded in Paris – within which Götz remained the only German artist. In 1952, he co-founded the group Quadriga in Frankfurt. As a central figure of Informel painting, Götz understood contemporary art as a radical counter-concept to the ideologically appropriated art of the prewar era. He developed an open, rhythmically structured visual language of streaks and overlays of color, full of speed and energy. With this approach, he not only shaped the emerging abstraction of the 1950s but also influenced the atmosphere at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he began teaching in 1959 and had a lasting impact on generations of students – among them Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Konrad Lueg. Götz’s works arise from rapid, gestural movements: liquid paint is applied, swirled, scraped, and reworked using squeegees, brushes, and spatulas in a controlled yet dynamic process. The canvas is often primed multiple times, sanded, and hardened – transforming the act of painting into an energetic intervention in space. No representation, but action: painting becomes a visual event. Götz’s oeuvre is permeated by calligraphic tension – not as writing, but as choreographed spontaneity. His pictorial language oscillates between structure and impulse, between lyrical rhythm and compositional precision. He was featured, among others, at documenta II (1959) and III (1964), and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1963), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1965), the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1971), as well as in retrospectives at the ZKM Karlsruhe (2013) and the MKM Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg (2014).

Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse (*1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) lives and works in Berlin and on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Münster and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she was a master student of Gotthard Graubner. Since the late 1990s, Grosse has expanded her abstract painting beyond the boundaries of the canvas – into architecture, landscape, and urban space. Her tools are a compressor-driven spray gun and industrial paint. Her first large-scale spray works were created in 1998 at the Sydney Biennale and the Kunsthalle Bern. Since then, she has painted ceilings, floors, rocks, fabrics, ships, furniture, and entire building complexes – independent of the substrate, yet always with precise compositional intent. Grosse conceives of painting as action – as an energetic intervention in space, a site-specific gesture. The color flows, overlaps, and condenses into an explosive, rhythmic choreography, reminiscent of complex musical scores. In her practice, calculation and intuition, control and eruption collide. Her works update the tradition of Informel and carry gestural painting into space – in dialogue with urban art, architecture, and pictorial tradition. From this tension emerges a visual grammar of color, surface, gesture, body, and perception. Grosse has exhibited, among others, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Kunsthalle Bern (2014); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2020); Albertina, Vienna (2023/24); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2024/25); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2025/26); and Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2025).

Hans Hartung

Hans Hartung (1904 – 1989) is a central figure for the idea of Written Art. He developed his abstract vocabulary as a teenager before coming into contact with modern art. Starting in 1935, he called himself a ›Tachist.‹ As a German, he fought against National Socialism in France and lost a leg in World War II. In 1945 he became a French citizen. For him, tachism meant the artistic conquest of fear. From 1948 onwards, Hartung’s art was understood worldwide as contemporary calligraphy. He took part in the documenta three times, beginning in 1955.

Hans Hartung (b. 1904 in Leipzig, DE, d. 1989 in Antibes, FR) grew up in Dresden and initially studied art history and philosophy before continuing his education inpainting in Leipzig, Dresden, Paris, and Munich. After World War II, in which he fought for France as a volunteer and was seriously wounded, he settled permanently in Paris. He was an important representative of European Art Informel and member of the artists’ group ZEN 49, founded in Munich. Hartung developed a painting style that seemed to be very gestural and spontaneous but often proved to be the result of a slow and controlled working process. Sketch-like linear compositions in which the artist allowed himself to be guided by the inspiration of chance and investigating the tension between the color field and the line are characteristic of his entire oeuvre. The powerful linework of his drawings and paintings frequently resonates with the traditions of Chinese ink painting or calligraphy, reflecting vulnerability, dynamism, and resistance in equal measure. The work of Hans Hartung has been shown at documenta (1955, 1959, 1964) and the Venice Biennale (1960, Grand Prize for Painting). In the Antibes, his last residence, the Fondation Hartung-Bergman now preserves his legacy.

T1966-E31
T1966-E31 1966

Susan Hefuna

Susan Hefuna (b. 1962 in Berlin, DE) lives and works in Düsseldorf, Cairo, and New York. The daughter of an Egyptian father and a German mother, she grew up with two cultures, languages, and writing systems. She graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 1992. In her installations, drawings, textile works, sculptures, videos, and performances, Hefuna references architectural and urban structures, for example, public places such as crossroads or so-called mashrabiya—the ornamental latticework in windows of historical Islamic architecture— which in her work can also be understood as representing social structures. Her works play with questions of inside and outside, privacy and publicness, visibility and hiddenness in their inherent ambiguity and porosity, their modular grids, graphic networks, and delicate volumes of shadow. They convey statements and single words in Arabic, English, and German, and sometimes lines from songs by the Egyptian singer Om Kalsoum. In this context, script functions not only as communication but also as sign and symbol—for example, in the form of crosses, arrows, and plus and minus signs—that are rhythmically embedded into the grids: sometimes legible, sometimes as an ornamental structure. Hefuna’s works have been shown at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); the Sharjah Art Foundation (2014); and the British Museum, London (2023).

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer (*1950) has worked on her series of ›War Paintings‹ intensely for years. Turning to government documents in 2004 after the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom, she aimed to reconstruct the path to war through the language of its architects and executors. Her canvases reproduce documents originating from various US government agencies. They feature statements by witnesses, interrogators, soldiers, and government officials. The documents were redacted by the US government before being released to the general public.

Jenny Holzer (born 1950 in Gallipolis, USA) is an American conceptual and installation artist best known internationally for her use of text in public spaces. She first studied drawing and printmaking at the University of Chicago and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University in 1972. In 1977, she earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in New York. That same year, Holzer moved to New York City, began working with language as her primary artistic medium, and became involved with the artist collective Colab. Since 1985, she has lived with her family on a former farm in Hoosick, New York. Holzer first gained international recognition with her “Truisms” – short, seemingly banal statements and aphorisms that she initially distributed as posters and later presented through LED displays, engraved stone benches, stickers, mugs, baseball caps, and T-shirts. Her Truisms were projected onto a building façade in Kassel during documenta 7 (1982). In 1990, Jenny Holzer became the first woman to represent the United States at the 44th Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Golden Lion for her work. She received the Kaiserring of the City of Goslar in 2002. Returning to painting in 2004, the medium in which she had originally trained, Holzer created her Dust Paintings by overpainting U.S. government documents with layers of color. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. In 2023, the K21 of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf presented her politically charged works addressing themes of crime, violence, destruction, and war.

I am writing sap green (Text US Government)
I am writing sap green (Text US Government) 2006

Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn (b. 1944 in Michelstadt, DE; d. 2024 in Bad König, DE) lived and worked in Berlin, Paris, and the Odenwald region of Germany. After studying in Hamburg and London, from the 1970s onward she created an extensive oeuvre of performances, films, drawings, texts, sculptures, kinetic objects, and installations. A serious lung disease in her early years influenced her perspective on her own body and its relationship to the environment as a space for thinking and images. Her early Körper-Extensionen (Body Extensions), in which she wore feathers, fans, or prothesis-like constructions, expanded the physical limits of the body and became, for her, instruments with which space could be sensed and appropriated. She explored the performativity of gesture in drawings for which she employed her entire body: with sweeping movements, she left traces such as lines, circles, ellipses, and slanting axes on large-format paper. Her own writing was central from the outset, so Horn’s works are often accompanied by handwritten notes—sketched fleetingly on the edge of the picture—through which her practice opened up to language. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1993), the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2006), and most recently the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2024) have dedicated comprehensive retrospectives to her work.

Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar (*1956 in Santiago de Chile, Chile) lives and works in New York. He is an artist, architect, and filmmaker. After studying architecture in Santiago and completing film training at the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura, he emigrated to the United States in 1982. Jaar creates works that make social tensions visible. His subjects include raw materials, migration, political violence, and global inequality – articulated through image, space, and language. His installations and interventions reveal realities without illustrating them; their formal clarity brings underlying complexities into sharper focus. Language plays a central role in Jaar’s practice. For him, text is not an accessory but a carrier of meaning and often part of the conceptual structure itself. In many works, he uses text – frequently in neon or as projection – as a spatially dominant interruption or commentary. (Kindness) of (Strangers) (2015) is based on a migration map from the same year. Neon arrows trace the refugee movements toward Europe triggered by the Syrian civil war – from south to north, across the Mediterranean and the Balkan route. Yet the diagram conceals the complex causes of global mobility. An accompanying map decodes the seemingly abstract composition as a visual condensation of real routes and a precise image of global redistribution. The work remains strikingly relevant today – amid new borders, new wars, new walls, and renewed waves of migration. It evokes associations of home, exile, and interconnection, of tourism and global circulation, and of the unequal distribution of opportunities. Jaar has exhibited widely, including at the Biennale di Venezia (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), the Bienal de São Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021), and documenta 8 and 11 in Kassel (1987, 2002). Major solo exhibitions have been held at the New Museum, New York (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2007); KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2014); and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2020), bei SESC Pompeia, São Paulo (2021), im MOCA Hiroshima (2023) und zuletzt im KINDL, Berlin (2024).

On Kawara

In 1963, the Japanese artist On Kawara (1932 – 2014) was one of the first to produce art with writing according to strict conceptual guidelines. In the 1950s in Japan he was still working figuratively. With the words ›Nothing, Something, Everything‹ a change was set into motion. Since then, he has evoked ideas of time and human existence with letters and numbers. These were left unexplained. They were painted or printed on paper with a typewriter or stamp. On Kawara (*1932 in Kariya, Japan; †2014 in New York, USA) is regarded as one of the most radical figures of Conceptual Art. From the early 1960s onward, he lived in New York—publicly almost invisible, yet artistically uncompromisingly present. His biography is deliberately understated; his art, an archive of lived time. After studying at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts, Kawara began his career as a figurative painter. The decisive rupture came in the early 1960s, when figuration gave way to language, number, repetition, and system. Beginning in 1966, he produced the Today Paintings—monochrome canvases bearing the date of their making, painted in a sober, white typeface. The date format follows the conventions of his location at the time, and each painting must be completed on the day it is dated—otherwise, it is destroyed. Each canvas is archived in a handmade box together with newspaper clippings from that day. The color palette varies between blue, dark gray, and vermilion red—always opaque, matte, and restrained. This rigor defines his entire oeuvre. In the series I Met (1968–1979), Kawara used a typewriter to list every person he encountered each day. In I Got Up (1968–1979), he stamped the exact time he woke up and his location onto tourist postcards, which he then mailed. In I Am Still Alive (from 1970), he sent telegrams containing a single message: “I AM STILL ALIVE. ON KAWARA.” For Kawara, writing became an existential marker—neutral, standardized, objective. It is not an expression of subjective emotion but a record of being, a proof of existence in time and space. His works do not speak; they register. For him, language is not communication but presence.

On Kawara’s works have been shown at documenta 5, 7, and 11 (1972, 1982, 2002) in Kassel; at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1993); the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993–2000); Tate Modern, London; and in the major retrospective On Kawara – Silence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Dallas Museum of Art (2015–2016).

More about On Kawara
JUNE 1, 1967
JUNE 1, 1967
© One Million Years Foundation

Franz Kline

Franz Kline (*1910 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA; †1962 in New York City, USA) is regarded, alongside Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, as a central figure of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. After studying in Boston and at the Heatherley School of Fine Arts in London, he moved to New York in 1939, where he initially worked as a stage designer and illustrator. At first, Kline painted figuratively—cityscapes, landscapes, and portraits. From 1948 onward, he developed his distinctive abstract visual language of bold black bar-like forms set against a white ground. His first solo exhibition at the Egan Gallery in 1950 marked his breakthrough, followed by international exhibitions, biennials, and museum shows across Europe, the U.S., and Japan. Kline’s work oscillates between impulse and control. His large-scale compositions—black and white for many years, later incorporating color—appear spontaneous and gestural, yet many of the seemingly eruptive line structures and expansive sketches were based on meticulous preparatory drawings. Using a wide brush and an expressive stroke, he applied planes and lines without figurative reference. “I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important,” Kline remarked—pointing to the careful balance of positive and negative forms in his paintings. Although he later denied direct connections to Japanese calligraphy, his work found early resonance there; notably, Hoboken appeared on the cover of the avant-garde journal Bokubi in 1951. Kline died in 1962, ten days before his 52nd birthday, at the height of his career. His works were shown at the 9th Street Art Exhibition (1951), the Biennale di Venezia (1960), documenta II (1959), and posthumously at documenta III in Kassel (1964). Retrospectives followed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1968), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1985).

Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon (*1960 in New York City) lives and works in New York. He studied at Wesleyan University and participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since the late 1980s, he has developed a conceptual practice that merges painting, text, printmaking, photography, and installation. From his perspective as a Black, queer artist, Ligon reflects on language, racism, representation, and collective memory within the context of U.S. cultural and social history. Ligon became known for his series of text-based paintings. He works with quotations from authors such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor, using oil, coal, or silkscreen, often applied through stencil templates whose standardized, mechanical letters evoke typewritten pages, mimeographs, faxes, or flyers. His restrained color palette – usually black on white, sometimes brown, occasionally red, or in neon lettering – refers to social dichotomies such as Black/White, visibility/invisibility. It evokes anonymity, bureaucracy – and resistance. Words layer, repeat, blur, and disappear. Text becomes image; language oscillates between legibility and near-indecipherable codes. Ligon’s work produces visibility through dissolution: language appears as a tool of memory, yet simultaneously as a symbol of structural violence and cultural exclusion. The four works in this collection belong to his series Text Rubbings – frottages made with charcoal and graphite on paper. Quotations, such as Zora Neale Hurston’s line “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” appear fragmented, overlaid, and traced through: legibility becomes a challenge, while illegibility becomes a strategy of making visible. Ligon’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2011), Camden Arts Centre (2014), Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2022), Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2024/25), and most recently at The Brant Foundation, New York (2025).

Nja Mahdaoui

Nja Mahdaoui (*1937 in Tunis, Tunisia) lives and works in Tunis. Mahdaoui is regarded as one of the key figures in the renewal of Arab-Islamic calligraphic aesthetics. After studying in Tunis, Rome, and Paris, he returned to his hometown in 1977. A decisive moment in his artistic development was his participation in the exhibition Espaces Abstraits I (Milan), curated by Michel Tapié in 1969. In dialogue with international artists such as Lucio Fontana, Hossein Zenderoudi, and Atsuko Tanaka, Mahdaoui began in the early 1970s to develop an independent, calligraphically inspired visual language. His practice encompasses painting, calligraphic drawing, installation, and performance, often in combination with materials such as parchment, canvas, glass, metal, and textiles. Even airplanes and interior spaces have become carriers of his distinctive visual script. His so-called “calligrams” are liberated from linguistic legibility and transformed into rhythmic, ornamental structures. The letter becomes line, movement, and gesture—an arabesque form that privileges visual ecstasy over literal meaning. An example of this is Astrolabe (2009), in which Mahdaoui translates the historical celestial measuring instrument into a visual grammar of color, order, and sign—a kind of calligraphic cosmography. Mahdaoui’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (1988); National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C. (1998); Sharjah Biennale (2003); Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2015); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, 2021); and in retrospectives in Tunis (2018) and Dubai (2022). In 2023, he performed at the Louvre Abu Dhabi with Naseer Shamma, and he is currently collaborating with the Khawla Art & Culture Centre, Abu Dhabi (2024).

Mark Manders

Mark Manders (*1968 in Volkel, the Netherlands) lives and works in Ronse, Belgium. He grew up in the province of North Brabant and studied graphic design and fine arts at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem. Even as a teenager, he worked in a graphic design studio – an early exposure to language, typography, and layout that has deeply influenced his artistic practice. Since 1986, Manders has pursued the concept Self-Portrait as a Building – an imaginary structure in which rooms, figures, and objects appear as fragments of a continuously evolving self-portrait. His sculptures, installations, architectural plans, drawings, and publications resemble snapshots: surreal still lifes composed of furniture elements, newspapers, modeled heads, and archaic objects. The materials are deceptive – bronze appears like dried clay, wood like painted canvas. Manders often scales his objects to exactly 88% of their original size, creating a subtly alienating effect. In Room with All Existing Words (2005–2022), one encounters a decades-long project devoted to language. The work consists of twenty large, pale mint-colored doors, before which stands a deck chair. The chair is constructed (or possibly covered) with newspapers that purportedly contain every word from an English dictionary. Among them is the rare, nearly forgotten word “skiapod,” referring to a failed myth that did not survive – the image of a fabulous creature with only one leg, capable of running at great speed. Manders represented the Netherlands at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Major solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago (2003), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010), Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2021), and Museum Voorlinden (2025/26).

Brice Marden

Brice Marden (*1938 in Bronxville, NY, USA; †2023 in Tivoli, NY, USA) divided his time between New York and retreats in Pennsylvania, Hydra, and Marrakesh. He studied at the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts (BFA 1961) and at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture (MFA 1963). In New York, he initially worked as a museum guard and, in 1966, as a studio assistant to Robert Rauschenberg – an experience that sharpened his sensitivity to material and surface. Marden’s work evolved from the chromatically restrained, mostly monochromatic canvases of the 1960s and 1970s – oil paintings mixed with beeswax, built up in many layers, with a matte, earthy tonality – toward an increasingly gestural visual language. This early phase sought the “surface” and a quiet concentration; later, the line emerged as a dynamic, rhythmic trace at the center of his practice. Travel played a decisive role, especially to Greece, India, and China. There, Marden immersed himself in calligraphic traditions and poetic concepts, while also drawing inspiration from natural forms – branches, stones, and the structures of Chinese gongshí scholar’s rocks. In his studio, he drew with sticks dipped in ink, developing networks of lines arranged in columns and rows. Color and line fused into layered compositions that oscillate between systems of signs and gestures. The African Drawings (2011–12) represented in the collection, begun in Tanzania, form a late, autonomous body of work: within a fixed 15×15 grid, ink fragments unfold into palimpsest-like densities – a “writing without language” that encapsulates Marden’s decades-long engagement with line, sign, and perception. Marden participated, among others, in documenta 5 in Kassel. Major solo exhibitions have honored his work, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1975); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006, traveling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2007); and the Kunstmuseum Basel (2022).

Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925 in Chicago, US; †1992 in Paris, FR) was a painter of force and nuance. Her gestural visual language was rooted in physical discipline: as a teenager, she was an athletic all-rounder – a competitive diver, tennis player, figure skater, and rider – pursuits that instilled in her a strong bodily confidence that would later shape the structure and energy of her painting. After studying at Smith College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 1947, MFA 1950), she spent 1948–49 in France on a fellowship – a place to which she would later return permanently. In 1949, she moved to New York and became part of the city’s avant-garde. In 1951, she carried her own painting through the streets of Manhattan to the 9th Street Show – a gesture of self-assertion within the male-coded sphere of postwar American art. Mitchell’s work – monumental, often multi-panel canvases as well as smaller formats, pastels, and prints – translates spaces of memory and perceptions of nature into energetic architectures of color. Rhythm, density, and layering define her compositions; color serves as an emotional vehicle. Her painting is not abstraction in the classical sense, but a synesthetic language of seeing, feeling, and remembering. From the mid-1950s, Mitchell moved between Paris and New York before settling permanently in France in 1959. From 1968, she lived and worked in Vétheuil – once Claude Monet’s retreat – where she painted in seclusion in a compound of house, studio, and garden, surrounded by dogs, friends, and fellow artists. Her work has been shown in numerous major exhibitions, including the Stable Gallery, New York (1953–58); documenta II, Kassel (1959); the Whitney Museum of American Art (1974, 2002); the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); the Kunsthaus Bregenz and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2015–16); and most recently at SFMOMA, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2021–22).

Morita Shiryū

Morita Shiryū (1912 – 1998) is one of the most important Japanese artists of the post-war period. In lively collaboration with American and French artists, he strove to promote Shodō, the ›way of writing,‹ as a contemporary artistic means of expression and as a philosophy. In 1963 he wrote: ›The movement of the Shō is carried out by the brush filled with Indian ink.‹ For him, the merging of the characters with the surface of the picture in the act of writing produced a holistic global experience.

Ryu wa Ryu o Shiru
Ryu wa Ryu o Shiru 1969

Herta Müller

Herta Müller (*1953 in Nițchidorf, Romania) is a writer and collage artist. Since 1989, she has created poetic miniatures by arranging cut-out words from newspapers and magazines on index cards. The small format becomes a space of freedom: her “word collections” speak of language, resistance, and memory. Müller’s collages are both text and image, soundscape and stage. The Nobel Prize winner, shaped by exile and censorship, transforms language into a visual rhythm of rhyme and resonance—a subtle, persistent echo against forgetting, and a testament to the enduring power of expression.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (*1902 in Berlin, Germany; †1968 in Cologne, Germany) combined powerful color with a musically conceived abstraction, creating pictorial spaces that do not narrate but vibrate and resonate. His painting followed no external order but rather an inner score. Born into a civil servant’s family, Nay turned to art at an early age. After his father’s death in World War I, he began painting autodidactically. In the mid-1920s, on the recommendation of Karl Hofer, he was admitted to the Berlin University of the Arts – a formative step in his development. Travels in the 1930s took him to Bornholm, Rome, and finally to the Lofoten Islands, where the light and landscape left a deep imprint on his visual language. Defamed as “degenerate” under the Nazi regime, Nay lost his ability to exhibit and work publicly. During World War II, he was stationed in France as a cartographer, where, under difficult conditions, he continued to produce works on paper and canvas. After 1945, he settled near Frankfurt, later moving to Cologne, which became the center of his artistic life. His postwar work is marked by a persistent spirit of experimentation. For Nay, color, surface, and rhythm became the foundations of his compositions. From the early figurative works to the later Disc and Eye Paintings, his oeuvre can be read as an echo of his inner state. Nay’s work was exhibited internationally – including at the Venice Biennale (1956) and at documenta I (1955), II (1959), and III (1964) in Kassel, as well as in Paris and New York. Honored early with retrospectives at the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover (1950), and the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1967), his oeuvre has continued to receive major posthumous recognition, including exhibitions at the Museum Wiesbaden (2002), the Sprengel Museum Hannover (2002/03), and the MKM Museum Küppersmühle (2022/23).

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat (born 1957 in Qvazvin, Iran) is currently the best-known Iranian artist. She grew up in a liberal Muslim family. During the Shah’s rule, she went to the USA as a schoolgirl, accompanied by her sister. When she returned to Iran for the first time in 1990, the political changes in her country triggered a cultural shock in her. The Islamic Republic did not allow Neshat to stay in her homeland. New York became her diaspora.

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Malaksima
Malaksima 2015

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (*1984 in Richmond, Virginia, USA) lives and works in New York. After leaving the Art Institute of Chicago before completing his studies, he participated in an independent study program in Pietrasanta, Tuscany, before moving to New York in 2002. There, he developed an artistic practice that radically intertwines political history, language, and visual systems. Pendleton’s work is interdisciplinary—painting, silkscreen printing, video, text, collage, and performance overlap in conceptual processes grounded in the principle of montage. Language, texture, copies, symbols, and gestural marks merge into shimmering black-and-white compositions, occasionally interrupted by metallic or monochrome color accents. Formal opposites—positive/negative, surface/depth, voice/silence—are made visible, though never resolved. Since 2008, Pendleton has described his practice as Black Dada—a visual, poetic, and political vocabulary weaving together Dadaism, pattern strategies, African American theory, and visual codes. Black Dada functions as a rhythmic system of repetition, variation, and intervention, resonating with the logics of dub, rap, or West African textile design. In series such as Untitled (WE ARE NOT), typography is layered, cut, sprayed, and rhythmically arranged in an all-over effect. Meaning emerges relationally—between fragment and resonance, gap and repetition, deconstruction and recontextualization. Writing becomes an open composition: legible, audible, yet never fixed. The collective “we” is also put into question—not as a stable identity, but as a dynamic structure of shared multiplicity and shifting voices. Pendleton’s work has been shown at Performa, New York (2007); the Venice Biennale (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2016); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Who Is Queen?, 2021); Tate Liverpool (2022); mumok, Vienna (2023/24); To Divide By at Washington University, St. Louis (2023/24); and most recently at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2025/26).

Qiu Zhijie

›Mapping,‹ says the Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie (born 1969) — meaning the design and artistic representation of maps — is one of his most important activities. He has already executed hundreds of ›maps,‹ not one of which solely depicts an existing world. Themes and research are his principal focus. Qiu is a trained calligrapher who relates writing and images, the Chinese and English languages, to fictional landscapes. His commissioned work ›24 World Maps‹ is an attempt to reflect upon all areas of human knowledge.

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Map of Art and Everyday Life
Map of Art and Everyday Life 2015-2017

Kazuo Shiraga

Kazuo Shiraga (1924 – 2008) was the most prominent member of the Japanese Gutai group. In 1956 Life magazine photographed him painting with his feet on a swing. For Americans, he was responding to Jackson Pollock’s ›drip‹ paintings. A Gutai manifesto published shortly afterwards in Tokyo recorded Shiraga’s technical method. The aim was to combine the physicality of paint with the dynamism of his own mind. Shiraga himself spoke of a ›proof of life.‹ Already in 1958, Gutai art was shown in New York.

Tenku
Tenku 2003

Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier (*1962 in Paris, France) lives and works near Paris. She studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. In 1984, she received a scholarship to study in China, where she became the first European woman to train with traditional calligraphers in Chongqing – among them Huang Yuan, one of the last masters of ink painting to survive the Cultural Revolution. Verdier remained in China for ten years, learning the “language of the line,” the discipline of gesture, and a deep material sensitivity to paper and ink—experiences she later recounted in her autobiographical book Passagère du silence (“Signs of Silence,” 2003). After returning from China, Verdier began to rethink two visual traditions: the disciplined, sign-based calligraphy of the East and the gestural, bodily painting of Western Informel. Rather than fusing them into a synthesis, she lets their attitudes encounter each other in productive tension. Her large-scale works are created on the floor with oversized brushes suspended from pulleys, guided in a single, concentrated movement. The line becomes an event—an impulse, a movement, a flow of energy. Verdier’s grande geste is not primarily an act of virtuosity, but one of inner concentration. Calligraphic discipline transforms into abstract energy; Western Informel becomes a meditative structure. It is precisely this tension—between control and release, East and West, form and gesture—that gives her painting its distinctive voice. Verdier’s works have been shown, among others, at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; in Königsklasse II (2014) and III (2017) at the Benediktbeuern Monastery; at the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence (2019); the Musée Camille Claudel, Nogent-sur-Seine (2022); the Saarlandmuseum – Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken (2022–2023); and the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar (2022–2023).

Lawrence Weiner

The work of Lawrence Weiner (1942 – 2021) explores the power of words and short sentences to trigger imaginative responses. Subjects and ideas are evoked, sometimes in the form of what appear to be cryptic appeals. In 2013, ›The Grace of a Gesture‹ was transported on Venetian vaporetti up and down the Grand Canal, its unitive message displayed in ten different languages. Simultaneously, the work was shown as a ›Collateral Event‹ of the Venice Biennale in an exhibition room near the Rialto Bridge. For Weiner, ›everything is essentially based on writing as it is essentially based on meaning.‹

The Grace of a Gesture
The Grace of a Gesture 2013
© Written Art Collection \ Philipp Ottendörfer

Yū-ichi Inoue

Yū-ichi Inoue (1916 – 1985), who worked as a primary school teacher in Tokyo throughout his life, was a trained calligrapher and heard about the main currents of abstract art in the USA and Western Europe. In the mid-1950s he developed his own technique with broom-like brushes made from tufts of dry grass. The idea was to create legible characters with the maximum artistic energy. From 1954 on, his large-format ink paintings were presented in many museum exhibitions that compared Japanese calligraphy with Western abstraction.

Ha-Ha Mutter
Ha-Ha Mutter 1962