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Indepth Arts News:
"HANNE DARBOVEN'S
EXPLORATIONS OF TIME, HISTORY, AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY"
1999-09-04 until 1999-11-07
BUSCH-REISINGER MUSEUM, Harvard University Art Museums
Cambridge, MA,
USA United States of America
Hanne Darboven: Works 1969/1972/1983 showcases
three decades of Darbovens work and her continuing exploration of the
relationship between aesthetic modernism and the treatment of history.
Through a selection of works from each decade, Hanne Darboven reveals the
complexity of the artists approach to time, history, and contemporary
society. Focusing on Darbovens use of a broad range of media, including
handwritten and typewritten texts, photographs, and films, this exhibition
demonstrates the range and intensity of one of Germanys leading
contemporary artists.
At the center of this exhibition, For Rainer Werner Fassbinder
(1983) is an impressive 90-panel work that includes postcards, collaged
photographs, and lithographic printing in addition to the artists
signature handwritten calendrical counting. On loan from the Municipal
Gallery in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany, this work has never been
exhibited in the United States. For Rainer Werner Fassbinder represents a
critical engagement with the work of Fassbinder, one of post-WWII Germanys
most important and controversial film-makers. Hanne Darboven opens
September 4 at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums,
where it will remain on view through November 7.
Darboven (b. 1941) first exhibited in New York in the late 1960s, where she
had extensive contact with Minimalist and Conceptual artists such as Donald
Judd, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt. During that period, she began creating
serial drawings, often in extensive sequences, based on systems of counting
she derived from the calendar. This technique became central to Darbovens
work, and the two other pieces in the exhibition showcase this pivotal
point in her career. An untitled work from 1969 (from the Panza
Collection, on long term loan to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York) consists of 147 typewritten sheets of calendrical counting, a
large-scale accumulation of possible visual formats and layouts for her
renderings and calculations of dates.
A recent acquisition by the Busch-Reisinger Museum offers another tabular
layout of numerical sequences and progressions. This 19-part untitled
drawing of 1972, handwritten in ink on vellum and related to Darbovens
massive work Requiem (1971-1985), exemplifies the graphic complexity and
originality of Darbovens calendrical drawings. Since Darbovens return
from New York to her hometown of Hamburg in 1969, her work has evolved to
encompass the diverse media and the challenging historical subject matter
represented in For Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Hanne Darboven has received widespread international recognition for her
unique and challenging projects. Since 1967, she has had major one-person
shows in museums and galleries throughout Europe, as well as in New York,
Chicago, and Toronto, and her work was included in the important
international exhibitions, Documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977), and 7 (1982) in
Kassel, Germany. Darboven represented the Federal Republic of Germany at
the Venice Biennale in 1982, and her 1997 work, 12 Monate (Europaarbeit) is
part of the permanent exhibition in the recently re-opened Reichstag
building in Berlin. This fall, Darboven will participate in the renowned
exhibition of contemporary art, the Carnegie International, held in
Pittsburgh.
The Art Museums have a long history of scholarship and study in
the field of German art and culture, and we are very pleased to present
this exhibition which examines one of the most important artists working in
Germany today. This exhibition will provide students and scholars with an
opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Darbovens work and the rich
historical and cultural tradition which has helped shape her distinctive
style, said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard
University Art Museums.
Hanne Darboven: Works 1969/1972/1983 is organized by Peter Nisbet,
Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, with Brigid Doherty,
Assistant Professor of the History of Art, The Johns Hopkins University, as
co-curator. The exhibition and related programs and publications have been
made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger
Museum.
The Busch-Reisinger Museum has recently taken a particular
interest in acquiring and presenting the work of postwar German artists who
approach art issues that are cooler and more conceptual than their perhaps
better known, more expressive and overtly emotional contemporaries, said
Nisbet. After exhibitions of the work of such artists as Bernhard and
Anna Blume (1996), Günter Umberg (1997), and Ben Willikens (1998), we are
very pleased to offer our students and visitors the chance to engage deeply
with a variety of work by one of the most complex, dedicated, and
individual artists working in Europe today.
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