Concrete Islands

Concrete Islands offers a poetic investigation into the intersection of words and objects. Inspired by Marcel Broodthaers’ 1964 sculpture Pense-Bête in which the artist took the unsold copies of one of his books of poetry and encased them in plaster creating an object that literally solidified poetry into a concrete form, Concrete Islands posits the question: where does language end and the world begin? The exhibition looks at a number of artists whose work follows in the wake of Broodthaers’ epiphany. Working in a wide range of media from sculpture and film to embroidery and typewritten drawing, this inter-generational group of artists, each in their own way, cross the boundaries between the immaterial and the material, between language and things, and between concrete poetry and concrete objects.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a book designed and co-published by ROMA Publications in Amsterdam includes an essay by Douglas Fogle and Hanneke Skerath along with additional images of works by Bas Jan Ader, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.