“In her letter images, Gracia Khouw uses visual language in our visual culture.
Rules of language and legibility are turned upside down to dissect the complex relationship between looking, reading and thinking.
In her compositions with letters and signs, she uses strict ordering principles, such as symmetry and grid form, image rhyme or fragmentation. The works appear as visual poetry in which sound plays an important role.
FOUR LETTERS
What can you say with four letters? Gracia Khouw is fascinated by four-letter words. Concise words that refer to objects or people, as well as words that convey feelings or abstract concepts. The four-letter words symbolize fast, compact, efficient and standard, appropriate to our times. She began collecting the words starting in 2017; first the English ones and from 2022 the search has expanded to include Dutch and Indonesian words, the languages she is at home in.
WORD IMAGE
What is a word image? The word functions as an architectural framework, as four letters that together mean something. At the same time, she approaches letters as signs made up of horizontals, verticals and curves. In the arrangements of thick and thin lines and of colored surfaces, she is concerned with the interaction with the residual space and mutual coherence. You experience a tipping point between word and image, meaning and form.
LANGUAGE
How do the three languages come together? Inside the collection, Khouw found 36 words where the meanings coincide; they are the starting point for new word images, which have been executed as giclée prints in different formats and for animations.”
In this edition "BUKU-BOEK-BOOK", 36 groups of word images rendered in striking colours and patterns, with reflective texts by Maaike Drescher and Alex de Vries in Dutch, English and Indonesian.
Hard cover, 21,5 x 25,5 cm, 88 pages, Den Haag 2023
ISBN:978-90-77794-41-8
