Deisler, Guillermo and Karla Sachse (concept and design).

[VISUAL POETRY IN THE EASTERN BLOC] Visuelle Poesie [Visual poetry].

Berlin: Club der Kulturschaffenden "Johannes R. Becher", 1988. Slim octavo (22 × 13 cm). Original printed four-panel folder, printed to recto and verso; fourfold leporello [8 pp.], 30 loose leaves printed to both sides, 1 folded gathering of [4] pp., all printed on coated paper, with numerous reproductions of visual poetry, some of which are full-page. Very good. Item #55230

First edition of the catalog for the first comprehensive exhibition of visual poetry in the GDR. The two curators of the exhibition, the Chilean graphic designer, muralist, and set designer Guillermo Deisler and the graphic designer Karla Sachse, met through mail art networks connecting Chile and the GDR. Following the Chilean military coup in 1973, Deisler fled into exile. Before settling permanently in the GDR, he also lived for a time in France and Bulgaria. For the Mail Art artists, the tradition of visual poetry was an important point of reference. Yet the interplay of text and image was not a harmless, purely aesthetic one in East Germany; under the conditions of secret police surveillance, Mail Art was also a strategy of creative encryption. The two curators did not exhibit the works solely out of historical interest, but also out of a contemporary interest in production aesthetics. In this way, prints from the Renaissance and Baroque periods were linked with futuristic, Dadaist, and contemporary experiments in Concrete Poetry from East and West. The loose-leaf pages of the catalog encourage the viewer to step beyond a purely historical perspective and actively try out other constellations. Here, the freedom of the letters becomes, for the viewer, a freedom of the pages.

The focus was on contemporary visual poetry. Among those represented were: Gregorio Berchenko, Julien Blaine, Augusto de Campos, Wladimir Dias-Pino, Fria Elfen, Korneliusz Francke, Jesus Galdamez, Ilse and Pierre Garnier, Eugen Gomringer, Klaus Groh, Dick Higgins, Kum Nam Baik, Arrigo Lora-Totino, the Noigandres Group, Clemente Padín, Michele Perfetti, Décio Pignatari, Robert Rehfeldt, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Álvaro de Sá, Veselin Sariev, Thomas Schulz, Serge Segay, Shozo Shimamoto, Miroljub Todorovic, Jirí Valoch, and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, among several others. Folder illustrated with historical and contemporary visual and concrete poems by Johann Helwig, George Herbert, Carlo Carrá, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Clemente Padín.

As of April 2026, KVK, OCLC show two copies in Germany and one in North America.