Art Metropole

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator and the recent recipient of a curatorial research fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He has curated projects for the Stedelijk Museum, Cooper Cole, Western Front, and the Badischer Kunstverein and his writing has been published by art-agenda, Camera Austria, Flash Art, and BOMB. With curatorial projects taking the form of exhibitions, screenings, and publications he is also the editor of I See/La Camera: I (If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution), Andrew James Paterson’s Collection/Correction (Kunstverein Toronto & Mousse Publishing), Jimmy Robert’s Revue (Leopold Hoesch Museum), and Nour Bishouty’s 1-130 (Art Metropole & Motto Books).

Hanne Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich. She studied painting from 1962–66 at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. In 1966 Darboven moved to New York, where she established herself as a major conceptual artist and was in contact with Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Joseph Kosuth, among others. During her initial stay in New York (1966–68), Darboven developed her Konstruktionen, which comprised a neutral language of numbers in linear constructions using pen, pencil, typewriter, and graph paper as materials. For this German conceptualist, numbers not only represented an artificial, universal language but also allowed her to mark the passage of time. For Ein Jahrhundert (A Century) (1971–75), she visualized the hundred-year span through numbers representing each day and year starting with the number 00 and ending in 99. Darboven made some additions to the work in 1982 in honor of the 150th anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In 1973 Darboven started integrating into her works texts by various authors, among them Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre. By 1978 she was also incorporating visual documents, such as photographic images and assorted objects that she found, purchased, or received as gifts. For example, in Bismarckzeit (Bismarck era) (1978), the artist included historical text and suggestive photographs to comment on the problematic episode in German history under Otto von Bismarck. Also in the late 1970s, Darboven, who studied to be a pianist earlier in life, began to devise a system of musical notation based on the calendar and her personal number systems, and, with the aid of a collaborator, adapted them into performable compositions. Throughout the 1980s, during which Darboven oscillated between Hamburg and New York, the artist extended the principles and systems she established in the seventies to major works such as Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983) (1980–83). In the 1990s Darboven revisited the theme of the century and produced a fin-de-siècle installation that engaged both her signature mode of marking time through the systematic writing of numbers and an investigation of an archetypal individual seen to represent the last one hundred years. These issues lie at the heart of Hommage à Picasso (1995–2006), her installation for Deutsche Guggenheim with date panels including an incredible 9,270 sheets of paper, a lithograph of Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting Seated Figure in Turkish, a series of purchased and commissioned sculptures, and a newly produced musical work.

Solo exhibitions of Darboven’s work have been organized by Kunstmuseum Basel (1974 and 1991), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1975), Kunstverein Hamburg (1983), Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (1986), The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1989–90), Dia Center for the Arts in New York (1996), Hamburger Kunsthalle (1999–2000), and Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2006). Darboven’s work was also included in major group exhibitions like the Guggenheim International (1971), Documentas 5, 6, 7 and 11 (1972, 1977, 1982, and 2002), São Paulo Bienal (1973), Venice Biennale (1982), Lyon Biennale (1997), and Carnegie International (1999–2000). Darboven died on March 9, 2009 in Hamburg, Germany.