Hanne Darboven (1941-2009)

Hanne DARBOVEN (1941-2009) German artist Hanne Darboven spent forty years trying to ward off chaos with her systematic drawings and was known for her mathematical music.?I write, but I don't write anything.? It was one of the mottos of the German artist Hanne Darboven, who died on 9 March 2009 at the age of 67. During her career she must have described millions of A4 pages with numbers and letters. The pages were displayed by the thousands, side by side and neatly framed, as at Documenta 11 (2002) in Kassel. Darboven was allowed to furnish three floors of Museum Fridericianum for that important exhibition. The installation, entitled Kontrabasssolo, opus 45, was a wonderful tribute to one of the most passionate and serious artists to have produced conceptual art. Hanne Darboven didn't write because she wanted to tell a story. She was concerned with the meditative act of writing itself, and with recording the time that this process took. In that sense, her work is related to that of On Kawara, who has also tried to structure time throughout his life. Due to the concentration and perseverance with which Darboven carried out her painstaking work, her work is sometimes also reminiscent of the striped drawings of the Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven. Darboven, born in 1941 in Munich, studied from 1962 at the Hochschule f_r Bildende K_nste in Hamburg. After the academy she fled oppressive West Germany and ended up in New York via Paris. There she met Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, leaders of minimalist art, with whom she became friends. Amid the chaos of New York, Darboven spent three years working at the same table in her tiny apartment on East 90th Street. It was during this time that her first serial drawings were made on graph paper, on which, for example, she systematically drew all days of the year or all years of the century. ?I refuse forms of expression, I am strictly formalistic?, said the artist, in his twenties, firmly. Darboven had already found her own style by then. She never left the conceptual path she took in New York. ?Art is a mix of idea and discipline?, said Darboven. Few artists have been as consistent, so uncompromising and radical as she has been. For over forty years she scribbled codes and characters on sheets of paper with her regular handwriting. She drew on texts from scientific or literary books, on philosophical reflections, on poems and old postcards. She scratched rhythmic lines, made repetitive strikethroughs. In this way she tried to get a grip on the chaos in the world around her. From 1980, Darboven, who had wanted to be a pianist as a child, started converting her own number system into notes. This is how her so-called 'mathematical music' came into being, which she then actually had performed by symphony orchestras. Darboven was invited four times to participate in the Documenta. In 1982 she represented Germany at the Venice Bi_nnale. Darboven, who was notoriously shy, lived in her parents' country house outside Hamburg in recent years.