PETER ORTMANIDEOGRAM17-29.05.1974

Between 17 and 29 May 1974 the poet PETER ORTMAN is exhibiting at Galerie S:t Petri, Lund. For the first time Peter Ortman appears as a visual artist.

Already at the age of twelve he made his literary debut with “The Horror Man in the Devil’s Tower,” written under the pseudonym Risotto Ravioli together with B. O. Edström. Other collaborations include “The Phantom’s Secret Life” (1962), “Dear NN” (1966), “To See Film” (1970), and “The Authors and the Film” (1970).

Peter Ortman came to Lund in 1961, became editor of Vox in 1964, and in the same year took a post at the Department of Comparative Literature with a focus mainly on film and modern poetry. In 1967 his first collection of poems, Privat O, was published. Two years ago he began working with music and poetry together with the Werup–Sjöström group, and at the same time he initiated the music group Singoalla. He also works as a literary critic for Sydsvenska Dagbladet.

About the works shown in Lund he says in a brief “à propos”:

Hand and Eye
Yes & No
The Child Scans the Heights
Perhaps It Will Get Over It
The Power and the Glory
Waiting in the Jaws of Tomorrow

What is it that I am showing?
Fixation-images and objects I have come to accept—or that have settled in me—over the years?
That exist in and of themselves? Yes and No?

Jean Sellem called me a conceptualist when he asked me to try to fill Galerie S:t Petri, but in my perforated innocence I have rather gathered that it is he who is the Conceptua…
Sure. 0 Art. 0 Construct. Construct 0. Construc—talism…

An unforced opportunity to take the whole for what it is not …
When words fail us, as usual, we send our greetings.

Warmly,
Peter Ortman