Hanne Darboven’s art sometimes gives the impression of a mathematical formulation such as the recording of a scientific experiment. With her minimalist language of form, the German conceptual artist sought to fuse and penetrate the moment, to affirm the predominantly unconscious through her artistic means.
(...) Continue readingHanne Darboven - Art studies in Hamburg; encounter with Minimalism
Hanne Darboven was born in Munich on 29th April 1941, the second of three daughters of a Hamburg merchant family; her father owned the coffee company J. W. Darboven. To honour her interest in the arts, one of her father's chauffeurs drove her to the Walddörfer Gymnasium (school) in the Volksdorf district of Hamburg, where her talent was encouraged. In 1962, Hanne Darboven began studying at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste under Almir Mavignier and Willem Grimm and after graduating, went to New York for two years, where she initially avoided any contact with the vibrant art scene in order to make her own way. However, she became friends with various representatives of Minimal Art, including Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt, and tried out corresponding artistic paths herself. Darboven created her first construction drawings on graph paper, which, like much of her art later, were based on calculations. In 1967, she had her first solo exhibition at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf, which was quickly followed by further exhibitions in renowned galleries and museums throughout Europe and the USA.
The transcript as the starting point for a new work of art
In 1975, Hanne Darboven began her key work, the so-called Schreibzeit. Writing represented a kind of conceptual act with which she did not simply intend to fill surfaces, but rather to capture a very specific point. For the project, Darboven drew from a rich pool of daily political news, historical texts and photographs - one of her early works was a copy of the first five cantos from Homer's epic Odyssey. The artist understood the process of copying as a double dialogue: On the one hand, the text spoke to her through its meticulous recording, and on the other, the experience she gained in the process enabled her to speak to her audience again. It was thus a process of self-awareness and self-communication that became formative for Hanne Darboven's work. She had found her system early on, but over the years she repeatedly succeeded in realising her proven method in new ways and setting fresh accents.
Art as the logical consequence of meticulous reflection
Hanne Darboven recognised the key to her art in the written word; she repeatedly drew inspiration for new, sometimes highly complex written and drawn formulas, from even her exchange of letters with her friends and acquaintances, which included numerous artists. For Darboven, these works were all logical results of her meticulous work, not improvisations thrown out in a creative frenzy, but equations, calculations, derivations that the artist developed through careful analysis. She juxtaposed her written images and number systems with sculptures: a donkey made of woven brushwood, a goat cast in bronze or a hand-painted picture frame. The forms she discovered in the process are sometimes reminiscent of Pablo Picasso.
Hanne Darboven died on 9th March 2009 in Rönneburg.
Hanne Darboven - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
