Charles Simonds — The Three Trees, 1985

Architekturmuseum in Basel, Basel
Original mailed exhibition card / invitation
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
Condition: very good, with light age toning, minor wear, soft corner friction, and visible signs of postal handling

Issued for Charles Simonds's The Three Trees at the Architekturmuseum in Basel in 1985, this 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 with it 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. In that sense the card behaves like a compact exhibition model. Not the exhibition itself, but one of its delegated surfaces.

That relay structure feels close to Simonds, but also to a Collin-Thiébaut-like logic: the artwork not as singular event but as something distributed through reproduction, framing, citation, and reappearance elsewhere. What remains here is not simply promotion, but a small operational fragment of the show's public life.

A mailed exhibition card with the right kind of double status: image-object and administrative residue.