Born to Concrete
16 April - 25 September 2011

Concrete Poetry is a cross-pollination between art and literature that takes many forms, including printmaking, typewriter text, Letraset, sculpture, found objects, and more. Arising in the 1950s, in separate initiatives by Swiss and Brazilian writers, it soon became an international movement, extending out of the literary sphere and into the art world. Treating the poem as an object, artists combined language and visual imagery in the spirit of earlier avant-garde movements – Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism and Fluxus among them – each of which used language in experimental ways.

Presenting works from Heide Museum of Modern Art’s Collection and Concrete Poetry Archive, this exhibition examines the emergence of Concrete Poetry in Australia in the mid-1960s and its subsequent developments. Heide has one of the most extensive national collections of Concrete Poetry, acquired through the generosity of individual gifts and two significant donations from the estates of editor and author Barrett Reid and concrete poet Sweeney Reed, the adopted son of Heide founders John and Sunday Reed.

A focus of the exhibition is Sweeney Reed’s work, which is presented alongside that of his contemporaries, including Alan Riddell, Alex Selenitsch and key international figure Ian Hamilton Finlay. Reed sought to publish Finlay’s work in Australia, a collaboration which is explored in this exhibition.

Taking its title from the first Australian journal dedicated solely to Concrete Poetry, Born to Concrete also features examples of the vibrant local publishing initiatives of artists and poets who created new avenues for the presentation of Concrete Poetry.