“Barely visible to the naked eye, concealed, impossible to see or secret. Thus can graphic characters appear at a distance in my minimalist, threadlike word drawings. But on closer observation, a tiny script appears expressing such phrases as “on certain days I feel like a line” or “two threads almost meeting”, or even the single word “yes” written in densely packed text hundreds of times on a sheet of paper. The language is condensed, repeated, broken down and visualised as long thin threads that now intertwine, now separate, again and again.
The letters Os in osynligheter (invisibilities) are also those of my grandmother Duifje’s family name. Van Os’s Jewish-Dutch family was almost eradicated during the Second World War in Amsterdam. There are, despite the underlying history of this ball of thread, many loose ends, kinships, cracks and links to the branches that have stopped growing at one end but budded small shoots at the other”, historical photographs of the old Jewish quarter in Amsterdam and archive material accompany the artist’s word artworks, poetry, and photographs forming a link between past and present, text in Swedish and English, hard cover, cloth bound, 19,5 x 24 cm, 96 not numbered pages, in a box with a signed print, signed and numbered/50, Stockholm 2016
