CHARLES SIMONDS — The Three Trees, Architekturmuseum Basel, 1985

Architekturmuseum in Basel, 1985. Original mailed exhibition card, 15 × 10.5 cm. Offset print on light card stock, black and white. Recto with paired photographic images; verso with exhibition details, Basel postal stamp, and typed address label to Connaissance des Arts, Paris.

Issued for Charles Simonds’s The Three Trees at the Architekturmuseum in Basel, 1985. The card now reads less as invitation than as displaced support material: an exhibition notice that completed its first function and remained behind as object.

The addressed reverse matters. Sent to Connaissance des Arts in Paris, it carries a small but precise social geography — museum, postal system, editorial office, archive. A work about passage as much as announcement.

The front is equally exact. A modernist building and a stand of trees are placed side by side with almost schematic clarity, as though the exhibition were being reduced to two transferable images: structure and growth, façade and obstruction, institution and outside. The card behaves like a compact exhibition model — not the exhibition itself, but one of its delegated surfaces. A mailed card with the right kind of double status: image-object and administrative residue.

Condition: Very good. Light age toning, minor wear, soft corner friction, and visible signs of postal handling. Original period item.