Heinz Gappmayr would have been 100 years old in 2025. We are taking this anniversary as an opportunity to honour one of Austria’s most internationally significant and recognised representatives of visual poetry with an exhibition in Innsbruck’s public space.
Works by him will be presented at ten locations throughout the provincial capital of Innsbruck. Gappmayr’s artistic vocabulary includes letters, terms and numbers as well as the simplest graphic symbols such as lines, dots and arrows. He is interested in their reduction to opposites such as black and white, the poles of number and measure and the categories of place, time and space.
The letter itself, in its form and structure, played a central role for Gappmayr. He wanted to free language and writing from their mere function as a means of communication and visualise them as an independent artistic medium. When looking at Gappmayr’s ten works, there are no absolute statements or fixed levels of meaning – rather, they offer a space for impulses as to what language is and can be.
PUBLICATION ON THE EXHIBITION
On the occasion of the exhibition Heinz Gappmayr. 100, Cahier 001 is the first volume in a new series of artist publications from the Modern Collection.
The publication will also be available at the opening in the Zeughaus.
