Pierrette Bloch

Technical specifications

Sans titre (Untitled)
2004
75 x 57 cm
Ink on paper Tinta Sobre Paper
Pierrette Bloch, (París, 1928 – 2017).

The work

The work consists of the repetition of minimal elements in a calligraphic gesture that carefully fills one row after another until the page is complete. Formed by small brush marks on the paper, they are rhythmic marks in horizontal rows. One perceives a gestural fatigue that causes the marks in the lower half to become increasingly spaced out, while the ink becomes diluted, as if the pen or brush itself were suffering the same fatigue and slow exhaustion.

The artist

Since the 1950s, Pierrette Bloch has been working in a lyrical and minimalist style. She uses not only linear strokes, but also undulations, dots, and other elementary signs of traditional artistic work. She has also used very subtle materials such as horsehair threads, mesh, sewing threads, and others, often suspended from glass stems or hung directly on the wall, eliminating all superfluous elements with maximum economy of resources.
We must frame this artistic research in the context of experimentation typical of the early 1960s, in a Western society that, in the midst of the Cold War, based its model on the unstoppable growth of the consumer industry with the consequent flood of images: from cinema, advertising, and commercials.
Minimalism in Europe emerged in search of a molecular starting point, a zero degree of art, a restarting of art, and reappeared at certain historical moments when there was a desire to avoid the drift towards nuclear holocaust with which the Cold War threatened the world after World War II.