HANNE DARBOVEN

Hanne Darboven is considered to be one of the most important and enigmatic figures in postwar German art. Following a brief period in which she studied as a pianist, Darboven went on to train in art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg from 1962–1965. Though based in Hamburg, it was during a two-year stay in New York in the late 1960s that Darboven discovered what would become her life-long project: the visualization of time in all its formations. Upon return to her hometown in 1968, she continued to live and work at her parental home in Hamburg’s Harburg district until her death in 2009. Selected solo exhibitions by Hanne Darboven include Kunsthalle Bern (1969); Westfälischer Kunstverein, Muenster (1971); Kunstmuseum Basel (1974); Deichtorhallen Hamburg (1991); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (both 1986); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1996); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1997); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Berlin (1999 and 2006); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2006); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn and Haus der Kunst, Munich (both 2015); Deichtorhallen, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg and Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (both 2017), and Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg (2020). Selected group shows include documenta, Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982, 2002); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1970, 1981, 1989, 2000, 2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1971, 1983); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1976, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2014, 2017, 2018); National Museum of Art, Osaka (1989); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1991); The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1994); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1996); Haus der Kunst, Munich (1997, 2003, 2008); Museum für Moderne Kunst MMK, Frankfurt (2000, 2010); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2013, 2016); Kunstmuseum Basel (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2017); Westbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2019); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2021), and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2022). She represented the Federal Republic of Germany at the 1982 Venice Biennale (along with Gotthard Graubner and Wolfgang Laib). “Darboven developed her unique permutational use of seriality and repetition, her surveys and collections of pictorial and cultural artifacts, by conveying a structure of representational totality through the indexical manifests of archival production and the procedures of cultural archaeology. Using numbers drawn from calendrical cycles that are further reduced to a maximum of six numerical digits, she devised a conceptual operation that transformed the temporal perception and spatial logic of her mathematical art through the structure of the grid. She would in time abandon the purely rational language of the grid and geometry by employing a modulated scansion in her handwritten drawings, thus moving toward a less strictly regulated scripting in her concept of calculations. This shift established a rhythm of sums and additions no less rigorous than what the strict geometry of the grid had earlier offered.” —Okwui Enwezor, “Folds of the Self: Hanne Darboven and the Quest for Universal Knowledge”