Hanne Darboven (1941-2006)

Hanne Darboven is known perhaps as the most important representative of Minimal and Conceptual Art in all of Europe. Having been consistently concerned with presentation of time, Darboven was the great chronicler amongst the conceptual artists. Since the 1960s, Hanne Darboven has created her geometrical constructions on graph paper and developed her own system of notation by means of which she puts years, decades and century on paper. In 1968 she began numerical additions with calendar dates using the divisions of the calendar as conceptual basis of her art.
Darboven created Kalendar 1992, a monumental work for the time comprising of 192 sheets of ink and collage on paper. One year is twelve months at 16 sheets. The structure of the work is based on an aesthetic concept, consisting of writing down and writing out temporal sequences. The daily arithmetic consisting of checksums came to replace the year's calendrical progression according to a complex mathematical logic. Her paperwork comprises rows and rows of ascending and descending numbers, u-shapes, grids, line-notations and boxes. At the end of each row we read "heute", which has become past while writing the word and therefore is crossed out.
The framed pages covering walls creating architectures of time. The installation makes the viewer aware of the weight of time through the sheer number of paperwork and frames.