Having grown up in the years of Minimal Art and American Conceptual Art, Hanne Darboven's artistic debut came in the mid-Sixties, with construction drawings, during her two-year stint in New York. It was here, after a brief geometric phase, that Hanne discovered her revolutionary and defining system for drawing and writing.
Logical and enigmatic at the same time, her work is made of signs, words, numbers and calculations.
"I use numbers because it is a way to write without describing. It's got nothing to do with mathematics. Absolutely nothing. I choose to use numbers because they are so stable, limited and artificial." This are the words Hanne used to describe her work in Artforum magazine in 1973. "My systems are numerical concepts, which work in terms of progression and/or reduction, akin to musical themes with variations. I like the least pretentious and most humble means, for my ideas depend on themselves and not upon a material; the very nature of an idea is not to be material."
Ideas then, relentless streams of thought that take shape in the compulsive need to write, to draw, to translate into numbers, to organise and to reduce to the essential.
Obsessed, compulsive, logical and oneiric, simultaneously rigid and poetic. Hanne Darboven's work must be examined in light of the trend, so typical of the Sixties and Seventies, for dematerialisation of art, extensively theorised by Lucy Lippard and Sol Lewitt, the reduction of artistic expression to a rational idea, independently of its concrete realisation.
From the late Seventies onwards, Hanne added a further dimension to her artistic vocabulary: music. Thus a musical system was born, in which numbers were replaced by notes, in which a numerical model became a performable symphony.
This exhibition, curated by critic Miriam Schoofs in collaboration with the Hanne Darboven Foundation from Hamburg, presents a selection of her work from the Seventies to the mid-Nineties, as well as some of her most important artist books, as even she preferred to label herself writer over artist.
The exhibition catalogue is available from the gallery.