Heinz Gappmayr – Raum, Reflex, Colors

Heinz Gappmayr (1925–2010), whose complex work significantly enriched concrete and visual poetry, is one of the most prominent representatives of the avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century. Between 1977 and 1983, he created three exceptional ‘book works’ that have lost none of their radicalism and conceptual clout to this day.

Raum (1977), meaning ‘room’ or ‘space’ in German, confronts the readers with forty white pages – likely causing some frustration at least among passionate readers because there is actually nothing to read. However, this ‘speechlessness’ reveals what is usually hidden behind the typographic curtain of the text: the book itself. For readers flipping through the empty pages, it appears as a spatial and temporal physical structure that has shaped the way that both knowledge and literature have been passed on since the codex replaced the book scroll in late antiquity.

Reflex (1978) is comparable in that it, too, is a ‘blank book’ – except for the one black page incorporated in the middle of the publication. What at first sight looks as if the printing ink of all the possible letters of a book were condensed on one page is deceptive because it is actually not printed in black but made of dyed paper. With regard to writing as a poet’s craft, these two publications are remarkable in that Gappmayr’s reflections on the nature of the book are material rather than linguistic.

The third book, Colors (1983), opens with a sequence of coloured paper pages that are followed by the terms that describe the individual colours, combining the books’ concrete material with a concrete linguistic level.

On the occasion of the centenary of the artist’s birth, this publication celebrates these unusual books that have now been reissued in close collaboration with the estate of Heinz Gappmayr.