What roles do writing and gesture play in modern and contemporary art? And how do text-based works permit cross-cultural dialogues beyond a Western perspective? These fundamental questions of artistic cultural and knowledge transfer are the focus of this special exhibition of the Written Art Collection, which has a unique profile as a long-standing cooperation partner of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collections). The exhibition is dedicated to the many forms of written and text-based art of the past eighty years—ranging from Western postwar Art Informel and conceptual art to the calligraphy of the Middle East as well as East Asia, and numerous positions in international contemporary art. The collection includes works on paper and paintings as well as textile works, photographs, media art, and installations. 

More than 120 works by more than sixty artists from twenty countries invite visitors to discover the panorama of written art from a global perspective and to discover the multifaceted interaction between script and image. From the abstract gesture to expressive handwriting, calligraphy, and typography, the exhibition traces the continuities and transformations of written art across generations and cultures. Artists invent imaginative alphabets and abstract languages of signs, write poems and calendar entries, quote from literature and political documents, translate ideas and conversations into spray-painted, graphic, gestural, or embroidered messages. This allows viewers to experience the performative nature of writing through its material and bodily traces—across painting, photography, and large-scale spatial installations.

The title of the exhibition, Sweeter than Honey, alludes to the sensual and poetic qualities of language. Honey is a fluid and cross-cultural symbol of the sweetness of knowledge and wisdom. At the same time, the title also stands the ability of art and poetry to make bitter and harsh words “sweeter than honey.”
The seven chapters of the exhibition are arranged according to chronological, geographic, and thematic criteria. In these times of crises and upheaval, writing is more present than ever in contemporary art as the medium of communication in a globalized, digitized, and urbanized society. It serves as means for politically engaged and socio-critical reflection on such urgent issues as migration and exile or cultural and social identity, but also as an expression of spiritual, poetic, and philosophical impulses.

Writing is omnipresent in contemporary art. In diverse languages, it permits incomparably vivid, varied, and immediate ways to address the challenges and crises of our time. It serves as a tool for socio-critical reflection, debates on migration and exile, or the exploration of cultural identity and interhuman relationships. In doing so, it reveals a transcultural dialogue that emerges through experimental gestures, contemporary approaches to calligraphy, and the evolving typographic image.  

Since the 1960s, writing in reduced form has been in the foreground of conceptual art as an artistic material. In numerous contemporary works, one encounters text in brief messages used to comment on both everyday political and personal themes. Several of these writing-based works of art possess a special relationship to public space—a place where we constantly encounter writing, signs, and symbols that structure, mark, and provide orientation to public life. At the same time, the street is also a stage for social gestures, protest, and violence. The power of writing and language therefore longer lies not solely in its legibility and ability to impart information, but also in its ability to create shared ideas and to trigger joint actions.  

After the catastrophe of World War II, artists worldwide searched for new possibilities of artistic expression. Gesture, trace, and sign became the connecting elements of a visual language of abstraction. Aesthetics of the violent, the raw, and the spontaneous reflected painful experiences, existential unease, and pure subjectivity. Their shared goals were to liberate themselves from the burden of the past and find a universal language for art. 

Paris established itself as a magnet and hub for the latest ideas on abstract art, which were grouped under the term Art Informel. Surrealism’s tradition of experimental techniques for painting and drawing offered a promising point of departure for new impulses. Inspired by travels and books, artists such as André Masson and Willi Baumeister sought new forms of expression in enigmatic visual symbols and techniques or in ancient cultures. Another path to abstraction was taken by painters such as Georges Mathieu, who wanted to suspend rational control by employing speed and spontaneity on large canvases.

The networks of abstraction in Europe were increasingly expanded after 1945 through exchanges with the United States. Moving in the opposite direction as the American Adolph Gottlieb, who had already traveled to Europe’s centers of art in the 1920s, the German artist Hans Hofmann moved to New York in 1933 and became one of the trailblazers of Abstract Expressionism.  

For the artists of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism, East Asian calligraphy became an important source of inspiration. The rapid movement across the paper, along with the pursuit of purity and perfection in individual expression achieved through minimal means, became a model for the West. At the same time, this approach carried a profound dimension of spiritual and existential searching.  

Direct engagement with East Asian ink writing can be seen in the work of Mark Tobey and Henri Michaux. Tobey, who studied calligraphy in a Buddhist monastery near Kyoto, came to the conviction that characters are composed of gestures and rhythms which he then translated into planar structures. Michaux, too, adopted the expressive gesture of calligraphic writing that inspired him on his own trip to Japan, and translated it into rhythmic, energetic brush drawings.  

However, admiration and appropriation of calligraphic gestures in the West were not one-sided. The avant-garde innovators of Japanese calligraphy approached the Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel of the West with great openness and curiosity.  

International exhibitions in the 1950s often showed modern masters of East Asian calligraphy alongside Western artists working with abstraction. Calligraphy thus established itself as a universal gesture of abstract world art and opened up an expressive space for dialogue between East and West.  

In the Arab and Persian world, writing possesses outstanding cultural significance and presence. Letters are not simply neutral conveyors of linguistic content but also symbols, each with their own distinct appearance and expressive power. Writing thus fulfills a dual function: as text and as image. For that reason, whether painting, calligraphy, or embroidery, it is also closely tied to cultural identity, spirituality, and poetry. In addition to its traditional use in religious texts, calligraphy can be combined with poetic subjects or serve as a visual accompaniment to emphasize emotional states. In the works of Mohammad Ehsaei and Nasrollah Afjei, calligraphic writing spreads diagonally across the canvases and thus underscores the emotional content of the verses.  

In Arab and Islamic cultures, writing is encountered everywhere: on architecture, ceramics, containers, and textiles. It is closely connected to floral or geometric ornamentation, which reflects both faith in eternity and the cosmic order of the world. Writing on buildings or objects can refer to their use or function while also serving as decorative elements. Farhad Moshiri’s depictions of ancient Persian ceramics, for example, have inscriptions in Iranian that refer to popular foods and drinks from his homeland.  

After World War II and the American occupation of Japan, the group Bokujinkai (People of the Ink Society) was founded in Kyoto in 1952. Its goal was to renew traditional East Asian calligraphy as a contemporary art form and bring it to international attention. Through reciprocal exchange with the West, the group revolutionized classical calligraphy by understanding the act of writing as an energetic artistic process and by expanding the material possibilities of calligraphy. The subjective expression of characters became central to this approach.   

Shiryū Morita, the editor of the journal Bokubi, was in direct contact with the artists of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel in the West. On several tours through the United States and Europe, he offered live demonstrations of calligraphy and gave lectures. Yūichi Inoue, the second great calligrapher of Bokujinkai, took the expressivity and vehemence of calligraphy even further. Reduction to one sign per work broke down the textual context in favor of the design and compositional elements of line and color.  

Kazuo Shiraga, in turn, advanced avant-garde painting as part of the artist’s group Gutai. By employing his entire body, he expanded the possibilities of the painting process, for example, in his so-called mud performances or by shaping masses of paint directly on the canvas with his hands and feet. 

With his long-term project World Maps, begun in 2010, the Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie is creating a poetic topography of knowledge. Between 2015 and 2017, he produced a cycle of twenty-four maps that intertwine art, science, and language. Each map, described bilingually in English and Chinese, is dedicated to its own thematic cosmos: from plants and animals to food. In these works, Qiu unites ink painting, calligraphy, and encyclopedia, geography and fiction, tradition and the present. The canvases show urban structures, seas, and imaginary landscapes with archipelagos, coastlines, volcanos, and mountain ranges, each of which the artist names.  

The structure of the maps also follows an internal logic: the Map of Architecture shows a clearly constructed city map; the Map of Body a human form in the courses of rivers, and the Map of Diseases and Medicine a seascape of bodies of water whose forms evoke organs. Together, the maps form a self-contained world—a network of knowledge in which the subject matter of all the themes is interwoven. For example, the Map of Travelers adjoins that of religion because trips are so often taken for religious reasons such as pilgrimages.  

In his work, Qiu connects to centuries-old traditions of Chinese calligraphy and painting. The form of his landscape paintings recalls the literati tradition that emerged during the Song Dynasty (10th–13th centuries), an artistic practice esteemed by scholars as a means of spiritual reflection and intellectual cultivation. They saw drawing as a way of thinking that was tied to writing and poetry. Qiu also continues in a contemporary form the tradition of the red seal used in Chinese painting and calligraphy as a signature and expression of belonging to a specific school.  

Literature, philosophy, religion, and poetry are essential sources of inspiration and reference points for text-based works of art. The process of writing often plays a crucial conceptual role. For example, the Belgian artist Thierry De Cordier has written thousands of definitions of the divine on enormous sheets of paper in an act of physical and mental energy in which writing repeatedly loses clarity and legibility. The Lebanese-born writer and artist Etel Adnan uses the form of the leporello to combine Arabic words and colorful basic elements of painting in the fluid rhythm of the folded book. The Chinese artist Chen Danqing paints opened books and thus raises questions about depiction and subject matter.  

Using imaginary alphabets or abstract sign languages, artists call into question the fundamental elements of writing and its rules of communication. Often influenced by their travels or experiences of migration and exile, they study writing in terms of its ordering function, as a medium of history, and in its claim to power. Out of illegibility or hampered legibility grows an aesthetic moment of openness and multiple meanings in the oeuvres of Maliheh Afnan, Brice Marden, Gu Wenda, and Glenn Ligon. Their works open new ways to experience the visuality of the sign and to activate various forms of individual and collective memory.