Hanne Darboven was a German conceptual artist. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad.
Background
Hanne Darboven was born on April 29, 1941, in Munich, Bayern, Germany. She grew up in Rönneburg, a southern suburb of Hamburg, as the second of three daughters of Cäsar Darboven and Kirsten Darboven. Her father was a successful and well-to-do businessman in Hamburg; the family brand Darboven coffee is well known in Germany.
Education
Hanne Darboven studied art with Willem Grimm, Theo Garve, and Almir Mavignier at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg from 1962 to 1965.
Career
Hanne Darboven spent two years in New York until 1968, where she was especially influenced by her contact with minimalist artists such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. Her works received international recognition fairly early. They could be seen in New York in the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and in the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. Darboven took part in "Documenta 5" in 1972 in Kassel, participating three more times in 1977, 1982, and 2002. Moreover, she represented Germany at the Biennale di Venezia in 1982.
In the 1970s, Darboven often allied her work, which she considered a form of writing, to the accomplishments of writers such as Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre, directly transcribing quotations or entire passages of their texts, or translating them into patterns. By 1978, Darboven was also incorporating visual documents, such as photographic images and assorted objects that she found, purchased, or received as gifts.
Hanne Darboven received the respected Lichtwark Prize in Hamburg in 1994. Since the late 1960's, she has been engaged in the visualization of time in her art through her own system of characters and symbols. Using number codes, texts, photographs, and diagrams, Darboven tried to hold fast the passage of time or historical events with simple typing paper, whereby she made the time dimension of her works perceptible as a spatial dilation by hanging these pages on the wall. Her intention was to make the rather imperceptible flow of time comprehensible and to show the limits of perception. Hanne Darboven died on March 9, 2009 in Hamburg.
Views
According to self-imposed rules, the artist focused on the thematic concept of time and the course of history. She used the calendar as a conceptual basis for her art, using dates and periods of time as the backbone of her works. On thousands of sheets of paper conceived as serial works she obsessively noted sequences of text and numerals, often combined with visual documents reflecting her own biography, contemporary history, or cultural phenomena.
Quotations:
"My systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations."
“I see myself as a writer, which I am, regardless of what other visual materials I may use. I am a writer first and a visual artist second.”
Membership
Since 1997 Hanne Darboven was the member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.