Fondazione ICA Milano presents, from Thursday 9 June to Friday 22 July 2022 , the BLANK exhibition, a retrospective of the Italian-German artist Irma Blank (1934, Celle, Germany) curated by Johana Carrier and Joana PR Neves. The exhibition is part of a path that includes six iterations, each aimed at deepening one side of the artist's production and adapted to the reference venue. The culmination of the traveling exhibition is the final chapter at the ICA Foundation in Milan, a particularly important destination as the city where the artist has lived and worked since 1973. This last exhibition therefore associates the universal nature of his work with deeply personal aspects. The works chosen for the exhibition focus on identity and critical self-reflection through the use of drawn and wordless languages, characteristic of the artist's entire ouvre. With this approach, Blank's work creates and therefore proposes a form of communication that goes beyond specific language.

Passionate about literature and language, Irma Blank moved to Sicily in 1955 from her home country, Germany. This geographical, cultural and linguistic uprooting constitutes the basis of his work. Realizing therefore that "the right word does not exist in the world", Blank begins to work on a first series of introspektive works, Eigenschriben ('self-writtings', 1968-1973) which represents the beginning of an artistic research that will accompany her for all life, based on invented calligraphy and stripped of the obligations of meaning.

This practice is technically called "asemic or semantic writing", a form of universal expression on the border between writing and drawing. The materials used by the artist also reflect this association, recalled in the use of pastels and ink as well as ballpoint pens and paint. Blank's radical creativity also leads her to work, in addition to painting and drawing, with very different media including screen printing, sound, performance and installation.