(Imperfect) Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979

This epic collection of works by women artists from the early days of this groundbreaking concrete poetry movement has been curated by designer Alex Barjou and poet Mónica de la Torre and features 50 artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America and the United States.

The impetus for Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 was the result of Materializzazione del linguaggio, a groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women that Italian feminist artist Mirella Bentivoglio organized for the Venice Biennale in 1978. Through this exhibition and other works, Bentivoglio traces the path of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and the visual, who sought to free language from the constraints of genre, gender conventions, patriarchy and normative syntax, "to reinvigorate a deflated means of communication."

The works collected in this volume develop from the concrete poetic idiom defined by Øywind Fahlström, Eugen Gomlinger, and the Brazilian Noigandres School in their Declaration of Fundamentals. Some of the works are easily recognizable as concrete poetry as documented in the canonical works compiled by Mary Ellen Salt and Emmett Williams in the late 1960s, but they also have explicitly feminist elements and are characterized by extended, often difficult to decipher sequences.

First edition: 3,500 copies.

Featured Artists/Contributors
Lenora de Barros, Ana Bella Geiger, and Mira Schendel from Brazil; Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Liliana Landi, Anna Oberto, and Giovanna Sandri from Italy; Amanda Berenguer from Uruguay; Suzanne Bernard and Ilse Garnier from France; Blanca Calparsoro from Spain; Paula Claire and Jennifer Pike from the UK; Betty Danon from Turkey; Mirtha Dermisache from Argentina; Bohumila Gr?gerov? from the Czech Republic; Ana Hatherly and Salette Tavares from Portugal; Madeline Gins, Mary Ellen Solt, Susan Howe, Liliane Lijn, and Rosmarie Waldrop from the US; Irma Blank and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt from Germany; Chima Sunada from Japan; and Katalin Ladik and Bogdanka Poznanovi from the former Yugoslavia.

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Title: Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979
Artist: Various
Editor: Alex Balgiu / M?nica de la Torre
Primary Information, 2020
Softcover, 203 x 228 mm
480 pages
First edition of 3500 copies
ISBN: 9781734489729

Condition/Mint