Grammars of the Possible

The exhibition brings together works by Mirella Bentivoglio, Amelia Etlinger, Elisabetta Gut, and Greta Schödl, placing in dialogue four distinct approaches to the relationship between writing, image, and poetic form. While each artist developed an autonomous and deeply personal visual language, all were connected to Bentivoglio through friendships, correspondence, artistic exchange, and a shared investigation into visual poetry and experimental forms of language.

For Gut, language is above all a visual experience. Her works draw on unknown alphabets, symbols, and codes whose semantic meaning remains inaccessible, yet whose graphic structure reveals an intrinsic poetic force. Writing becomes image: a composition of signs perceived intuitively rather than linguistically deciphered.

Schödl approaches language through repetition and duration. By repeatedly writing the same word, she gradually dissolves its descriptive function in order to distill its rhythm, density, and emotional resonance. In her work, writing becomes a meditative gesture whose visual cadence conveys the very essence of language.

Bentivoglio investigates language both poetically and conceptually, expanding and shifting meanings through the interaction of words and images. Her artist books and object-books reveal a particular attention to the symbolic value of the book itself as both a physical and conceptual form: a space in which language becomes object, structure, and metaphor.

Originally trained as a poet within the mail art network, Etlinger presents delicate postal poems and a tapestry poem composed of textile fragments, feathers, dried vegetal elements, and sparse handwritten words or letters.