Bloom is pleased to present the works of Elsa Werth (FR), Kay Rosen(US) and Voebe de Gruyter(NL) in the exhibition “Waiting words”.

Waiting words
Artists: Voebe de Gruyter, Kay Rosen, Elsa Werth
21 March  - 10 May, 2025
BLOOM Gallery, Düsseldorf

„I don’t set out to send a message. They emerge as a natural product of the structure, self generated by the words or phrase. My role is primarily cognitive, discovering a message that’s concealed in a bit of text.” -Kay Rosen-

Bloom is pleased to present the works of Elsa Werth (FR), Kay Rosen(US) and Voebe de Gruyter(NL) in the exhibition “Waiting words”. The exhibition is a survey on the intriguing relationship between language and visual art. The invited artists all apply words for visual and acoustic experience in space.
The artists break the rules of linguistics, twist the common expressions and interweave the texts and images. The exhibition recalls the fact that humor is one of the most significant, often underestimated attributes of many artists.

Kay Rosen (b. 1943, Corpus Christi, Texas, lives and works in New York City and Gary, Indiana)
Kay Rosen’s investigation into the visual possibilities of language has been her primary focus since
1968 when she traded the academic study of languages for language-based art. Through paintings,
drawings, murals, prints, collages, and videos, Rosen has sought to generate new meaning from
everyday words and phrases by substituting scale, color, materials, composition, graphic design, and
typography for the printed page.
While political issues often form the bedrock of Rosen’s artwork, she insists that her work is driven not
by politics, but by language, and she follows it to whatever place it takes her. Rosen considers language
to be found material, placing her in the more passive role of an observer of written and oral speech,
whose potential she recognizes and enables through minimal intervention. The writer Rhonda
Lieberman described her as a revealer of language who “shows it doing things that are totally above,
beyond, and/or below its function as a mode of communication.”
Rosen’s work has been described as sculpture, poetry, architecture, and performance. In The New York
Times Roberta Smith once called her a “writer’s sculptor” and the poet Eileen Myles called her the
“poet of the art world.” In a 2014 article for Art In America, Rosen weighed in: “The linguist in me
wanted meaning to be carried by the structure of the words, not type style; the inner painter insisted
that color convey meaning; the sculptor in me obsessed about the construction of letterforms through
materials and process; and any poetic instincts strove for efficiency.”
Rosen’s work has been the subject of numerous articles, reviews, and group and solo exhibitions and
projects worldwide, including a survey show of her work in 1998 at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, and Otis College of Art Design titled “Kay Rosen: Lifeli[k]e,” curated by Connie Butler
and Terry R. Myers. A partial survey exhibition titled “Kay Rosen: Now and Then,” curated by Ingo

Clauss, took place in 2023 at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, in Bremen, Germany. Her work
is part of major institutional collections, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney
Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Rosen taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for
twenty-four years.

Voebe de Gruyter (born in The Hague, lives and works in Brussels)
Voebe de Gruyter has studied at Rietveld academie in Amsterdam (1986) and at Rijksacademie voor
beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (1995). Propositions on unexpected regularities - Voebe de Gruyter's
work can be described as narrative conceptual art. Although she uses all possible materials in her work,
its basis lies in drawing, in the direct entrusting of thoughts and ideas to paper, without these thoughts
or ideas having to be elaborated. Based on an evocative idea, expressed in text or image, she creates, as it
were, a force field within which the thoughts of the viewer are sharpened. In the work Een ei leggen in
de nek van een vreemdeling (Laying an egg in the neck of a stranger, 2000), for example, she uses
sketches to describe how you could place concentrated attention (in the form of an egg) in the collar of
someone by concentrating very hard on that person. De Gruyter investigates the behavior of
elementary particles, as an artist - not as a scientist (although her assumptions often appear to be close
to theirs) - with always surprising consequences. In Chewing Gum Drawings (1994), for example, she
investigated her suspicion that information can penetrate small particles, that the sentences spoken by
people chewing gum end up in the chewing gum.
Her works have been exhibited internationally: UnSalon Hang, kunstverein, Amsterdam (NL); Les
Pays-Bas, l’autre pays des beaux-arts, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Meymac (FR); Das Raunen der
Sammlung, Teil 2, Kunstmuseum Bochum (DE); 2019 De chemie tussen taal en beeld, Bergen(NL) and
others. She has participated in Residency programs: 2024/2012 Chinese European Art Centre (Xiamen,
CN); 2015 Het vijfde seizoen (Den Dolder, NL); 2009 Cité des Arts (Paris, FR); 2000 I.S.P. (New York,
US) and others.

Elsa Werth (*1985, Paris, lives and works in Paris)
Elsa Werth earned a BFA in visual communication at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts décoratifs,
Paris (2009) before she studied Fine Arts at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2013).
Elsa Werth develops work in multiple forms: installations, sculptures, videos, artists’ books and sound
pieces. The economy of work, the ways of working constitute the context from which her artistic
practice unfolds. She takes into account ordinary actions, daily gestures linked to contemporary
activities and rituals by designating them and destabilizing them through operations of displacement,
counter-uses, disruptions. She was awarded the 23e Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize for Contemporary
Art in 2022 and the Humankind Leo Burnet Prize in 2013. Her works have been exhibited
internationally in institutions including Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Art Museum of Nanjing University; B09K,
Changsha, China; Coimbra Biennial; BSMNT, Leipzig; Société, Brussels; NordArt, Büdelsdorf;
Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris; Fondation Fiminco, Romainville; Frac des Pays de la Loire,
Carquefou; Frac Normandie, Caen; Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon; MRAC, Sérignan; MAMC Saint-
Etienne; Centre d’Art Bastille, Grenoble; Cabinet du Livre d’Artiste, Rennes and others.