Hanne Darboven
‚Enlightenment‘

Munich

Hanne Darboven’s Enlightenment is the first retrospective honoring the German artist. Darboven revolutionized Minimal Art and brought it to a wide scene and audience accompanied by her long-life friends and fellow artists Sol LeWitt, Carle Andre and Joseph Kossuth. Her career is built on a remarkably wide body of work, all related to the matter of numbers. She created a language around them and later established a convertible alphabet for instrumental purpose. Visual and aural art were all formulated through her unique and lasting numeric terminology.

Enlightenment is a direct reference to the impact Darboven brought to art scene by initiating her own lexicon that will characterize her technique. Her ‚Konstruktionen‘ initiated after numerous meticulous drawings on millimeter paper are a time representation conveyed under the appearance of numbers. Considered as her own form of writing, Darboven will use her symbols to transcript Jean-Paul Sartre theories or Heinrich Heine books. 1978 marks the beginning of her large-scale installations for which she is known nowadays. Entire walls covered with her cardinal writing constitute the core of ‚Enlightenment‘ and thus imitate the iconic library of the Age of Enlightenment. Along with her visible artworks, her musical ones are played in order for the viewer to get the full experience of Hanne Darboven’s universe.

Hanne Darboven’s studio in Hamburg-Harburg, Hanne Darboven Foundation, Hamburg, photo © Felix Krebs

Hanne Darboven, Quartett ›88‹, 1988, Glenstone, installation view, Haus der Kunst, 2015, photo Maximilian Geuter © Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015

Haus der Kunst
Bundeskunsthalle

September 18 – February 02, 2015

Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstraße 1
80538 Munich
Germany

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