The German-Danish painter, poet and Fluxus artist Arthur Köpcke, who died in 1977 at the age of 49, radically questioned the boundaries of art. His comprehensive oeuvre is a collage of literature, painting, object, conceptual and action art. Köpcke not only switched media with ease, but also roles (those of the artist, the gallerist and the mediators of art), the orthography of his name and language itself: German, Danish and English.

Köpcke’s conceptual main work, the so-called “reading/work-pieces” (1963-65), features chiefly a combination of banal subjects from newspaper magazines, puzzles and language games.