Almine Rech Gallery New York is pleased to present its seventh exhibition, Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go, a group show that will be held from October 30th to December 16th, 2017.

Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go will focus on the word as an image and its metonymic relation to the motif itself. The title refers to William Shakespeare, as Ed Ruscha put it: “a noble quotation that is as timeless as it is poetic”. The starting point of the exhibition is anchored in an astonishing group of rarely-seen early paintings and papier collés by Pablo Picasso from his Cubist period, introducing words as pictorial elements in modern art. From Cubism to Dadaism, and Surrealism up to post-war art, the exhibition follows the increasing importance of words in artworks. René Magritte’s iconic work, The Treachery of Images, with its statement “This is not a pipe”, is a key moment in art of questioning the pictorial representation of a subject. It opens up the overlap of art, writing, and language. Following the Second World War, artists such as Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Ed Ruscha and Joseph Kosuth made words one of their main motifs and resources, sometimes claiming them as objects. Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Martin Kippenberger from the 1980′s offer further outlook to the very broad use of words and language in contemporary art.

List of exhibited artists:

Antonin Artaud

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Alighiero Boetti

Georges Braque

Francesco Clemente

Joseph Cornell

Juan Gris

Martin Kippenberger

Joseph Kosuth

Barbara Kruger

Sol LeWitt

René Magritte

Robert Morris

Pablo Picasso

Larry Rivers

Ed Ruscha

Mario Schifano

Kurt Schwitters

Cy Twombly

Ben Vautier

Andy Warhol