Hanne Darboven (1941-2009)

German artist, Hanne Darboven is best known for her large-scale installations of hand-written numerical tables and scripts that she called Konstruktionen. After briefly moving to New York in 1966 from Hamburg, Darboven became acquainted with important Conceptual artists and proponents of Minimalism, such as Sol Lewitt, Carl Andre, and Joseph Kosuth, and quickly established herself as an important figure in the Conceptual vanguard. By the late 1970s, Darboven devised a system of musical notation based on calendars, which she then adapted into performable compositions.

The present lot, Variation No. 23, consists of sixteen sheets of numbers one through ten serially typed and hand-written in both German and numerically. While some lines are left untouched, others are meticulously crossed out and labeled with handwritten digits in accordance with the artist’s own personal numerical system. Attracted to numbers for their artistic and abstract qualities, Darboven worked mostly in series as a way to visualize time, which the artist believed to be the essence of existence.

Throughout her career, in perhaps the same spiritual vein as Agnes Martin, Darboven methodically and obsessively recorded the flux of time through her delicate numerical mark-making. “I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing .... I choose numbers because they are so steady, limited, artificial. The only thing that has ever been created is the number” (H. Darboven, quoted in L. Lippard, "Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers," Artforum, October 1973, pp. 35-36).