Vienna-Based Artist Anatol Knotek Takes Ordinary Words Apart And Rebuilds Them Into Objects, Installations, And Quietly Radical Visual Poems
Anatol Knotek is a Vienna-based artist and visual poet whose work sits at the intersection of language and image. Words, letters, and short phrases become his raw material — he turns them into objects, installations, and paintings rather than treating them as something merely to be read. He has said he doesn’t consider himself a writer in the classical sense; what draws him is the physicality of language, the short phrase, the play with its shape.
Knotek’s visual poetry is minimal and often built around a single word or a brief sentence that he takes apart, rotates, cuts, or transforms into a physical thing. He works with wooden letters, fabric, acrylic, typewriters, and digital formats. One of his best-known pieces, “the solution,” shows the word “problem” losing its letters one by one until only “poem” remains on the wall — a work that later reached a wider audience through a collaboration with Cos.
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He exhibits internationally, and his concrete and visual poems appear in journals, anthologies, and school textbooks. He makes handmade books in small editions, along with apps and text-based animations. His palette is almost always reduced to black and white — something he has explained through his color blindness, which in his youth pushed him away from painting and toward conceptual objects.
