DE-6 1965

This is DE-6 by Jiří Balcar, made sometime before 1968. Looking at it, I imagine Balcar’s studio, probably full of prints, maybe in stacks, and him hunched over this plate, etching and biting, then proofing it, adding, and subtracting. It’s a very graphic piece, featuring different alphabets and bar graphs all sort of suspended in space. It's like a collision of information – the language of math with the language of art. I bet he was thinking about how information is structured and how we read different kinds of signs. It reminds me a bit of the work of Dieter Roth, who was also playing around with alphabets and unusual information systems at the time. Artists are magpies, you know, always borrowing from each other, trying to make something new. It’s an ongoing exchange of ideas across time. What he’s doing here is not spelling things out for us, but rather inviting us to join in the game.