Art Blog

HANNE DARBOVEN: HOMMAGE À PICASSO

Deutsche Bank & Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation: 04 / 02 - 23 /04/ 2006

Portrait of the Artist, 2004 © Deutsche Guggenheim

German artist Hanne Darboven (b. 1941) began her art studies in 1952 at age eleven, and in 1962, she enrolled at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg. By 1966 Darboven had left both the Hochschule and Germany behind to move to New York. Employing the neutral language of numbers and using pen, pencil, the typewriter, and graph paper as materials, she began to make simple linear constructions of numbers that she called Konstruktionen. In these early pieces, the graph paper’s grid structure seems almost to shape the work, as can be seen in the artist’s frequent use of square forms and 4 x 4 groupings of numbers, both handwritten and typed. It was these Konstruktionen that garnered the attention of the American artist Sol LeWitt, who befriended Darboven and became an early champion of her work, which had certain affinities with his conceptual art. ...

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