Breaking Lines: The World Wide Poetry Network, 1900 - 2000 - Works from the Bonotto Collection

The Estorick Collection starts 2025 with an in-depth exploration of experimental visual poetry, hosting an exhibition of artworks and related publications from Italy’s unrivalled Bonotto Collection.

The twentieth century saw the emergence of a number of significant verbo-visual movements and tendencies, including Concrete and Sound poetry, all of which shared the ambition of Futurism’s founder, F. T. Marinetti, to “redouble the expressive force of words” by emphasising and exploiting the graphic and sonic dimensions of language. Many of these avant-garde schools and associations also shared the Futurist vision of artistic expression as a vehicle for changing the world – an ambition that is reflected in much of the material included in the show.

At the heart of the exhibition is a consideration of the long-standing role played by journals in the dissemination of cutting-edge poetic research, and of their remarkable success in fostering an international creative community in the pre-Internet age. These publications were militant organs, active laboratories, experimentations in print. Through journals such as Blast, Geiger, Noigandres and Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., artists and visual poets developed new expressive possibilities and aesthetic solutions, and all the major avant-garde movements published their manifestos and works in them.

Taking Futurism’s bold, unconventional approach to language and typography as its starting point, this immersive show leads visitors through 100 years of international poetic innovation, and includes works and publications by figures such as Carlo Belloli, Tullio Crali, John Furnival, Eugen Gomringer, Corrado Govoni, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Eugenio Miccini and Emmett Williams.

Julien Blaine, Géranonymo (1972), 2001, print on card, 84 x 150 cm