Exhibition:
'Seeing Words. Between Writing and Image'
Selected works from the
Dionisio Gavagnin Collection
Artworks by
Jeffrey Wolin
Sofía Fernández-García
Cristina Comparato
September, 2026
Lab27 inaugurates its new 2026–27 programme with the exhibition Seeing Words. Between Writing and Image, opening on September 25 at 9 p.m., curated by Steve Bisson and Dionisio Gavagnin. Bringing together a selection of unique works of Visual Poetry from the collection of Dionisio Gavagnin with more recent works by Jeffrey Wolin, Sofía Fernández-García, and Cristina Comparato, the exhibition explores the shifting relationship between word and image, examining the ways in which this relationship contributes to constructing, directing, and questioning our perception of reality. Spanning a period of 60 years, the exhibition reflects on the power of images in contemporary society and on the mechanisms that determine how they are read—from mass communication to advertising, from memory to the representation of violence, and ultimately to the current proliferation of digital images.
Visual Poetry questioned language and the social role of the image during the second half of the twentieth century. By freeing the word from the linearity of the page and the image from its presumed neutrality, artists developed strategies capable of exposing the mechanisms through which communication produces consensus, desire, and value. It is no coincidence that this investigation also encompassed art, advertising, and the increasing transformation of the image into a commodity: to challenge language also meant challenging the systems that use language to define, classify, and sell reality. In this sense, many experiments in Visual Poetry anticipated a condition that is now familiar to us: the blending of verbal, photographic, graphic, and optical elements that characterises the internet and the digital ecosystem. Long before the web made this contamination commonplace, Visual Poetry had already understood that an image is more than what it shows, just as a word is more than what it says.
