Hanne Darboven

Hanne Darboven, a German conceptual artist, gained renown for her installations which consist of meticulously handwritten tables of numbers.

Biography of Hanne Darboven 

Hanne Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich, Germany. After honing her craft in painting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Darboven relocated to New York, where she solidified her position as a pivotal figure in conceptual art.

In New York, she commenced work on her "Konstruktionen," which consisted of a neutral language of numbers arranged in linear constructions using pen, pencil, typewriter, and graph paper. For her, numbers served as an artificial yet universal language, enabling her to delineate the passage of time.

In the 1970s, she began incorporating texts by authors such as Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre into her work, along with visual documents, photographic images, and various objects that she encountered, bought, or received as gifts. Additionally, during this period, Darboven, who had previously studied to be a pianist, developed a system of musical notation.

During the 1980s, she oscillated between Hamburg and New York, further developing the principles and systems she had established in the previous decade. In 1986, she received the Edwin-Scharff-Preis der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg.

In the 1990s, Darboven returned to the theme of the century, creating a fin-de-siècle installation that combined her hallmark method of marking time through systematic number writing with an exploration of an archetypal individual symbolizing the past century.

The artist received the Lichtwark-Preis der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg (1994) and the Internationaler Preis des Landes Baden-Württemberg für Bildende Kunst (1995). In 1997, Hanne Darboven became a Member of Akademie der Künste (Berlin). 

Hanne Darboven died in 2009 in Hambourg, Germany.

Notable exhibitions of Darboven's works have been held at Galerie Greta Meert in Brussels, Martine Aboucaya in Paris, Phoenix Art in Hamburg, Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann in Zurich, Galerie JuleKewenig in Frechen, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, and many more.