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Hanne Darboven: Hommage à Picasso
February 4 to April 23, 2006
Hanne Darboven’s installation Hommage à Picasso for Deutsche Guggenheim (February 4 to April 23, 2006) documents the last decade of the twentieth century and is at the same time an extraordinary homage by Germany’s internationally and perhaps most renowned female artist to the male artist of the twentieth century.
Hanne Darboven developed her own conceptual approach as early as the 1960s. In the neutral language of numerals and through the use of materials such as pen, pencil, typewriter, and graph paper, the artist created simple, linear constructions of digits, which she called constructions. In the course of time, Darboven arrived at a new scheme of applying her numerical elements. She realized that the digits designating dates on the Gregorian calendar could serve as a neutral, “graphic equivalent for the basically non-visual phenomenon of time,” thus offering the possibility of writing without describing. The recording of time, which becomes concrete in Darboven’s daily notation of the date in different forms of writing (digits, words) and is based on an ever-evolving system of her own making, became the key aspect of her artistic work.
Starting in 1973, Darboven began incorporating additional elements in her work, among them texts by various authors, photographs, and assorted objects that she found, purchased or received as gifts. Such items enhanced her exploration of specific and varied aspects of time and history, including an abstract variant of biography, and allowed Darboven to maintain and expand upon her personal, formal and conceptual approach. In the late 1970s, the conceptual artist created a system to produce musical scores based on calendar dates and her own personal number systems.
In Hommage à Picasso, she combines sheets of paper with dates marking the last decade of the twentieth century with a framed lithograph of Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting Seated Figure in Turkish, a series of purchased and specially commissioned sculptures ranging from a bronze, Roman-style bust of Picasso to birch-twig donkeys made by Polish craftsmen, and the newly-produced orchestral composition for 120 voices, Opus 60.
She began working on this project in the mid-1990s. The turn of the millennium was rapidly approaching, and as an artist intensively focused on time and deeply committed to the theme of the century, Darboven turned her attention to what that moment meant for her personally and what position one could generally take regarding the art of the twentieth century. The resulting work engages her signature record of time, and it investigates a common theme of the 1990s: the search for archetypal individuals seen to fully express the spirit of the last one hundred years. In the case of art, this figure was clearly Pablo Picasso.
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Taken together, the various components of the installation paint a multi-layered, double portrait of the artists Pablo Picasso and Hanne Darboven, which interrogates the role of repetition, citation and homage in art. While Hommage à Picasso acknowledges that Picasso was the last great painter of the twentieth century, it argues that the repetitiveness of his late work – and its legacy in the decades following his death – revealed the limitations of the medium and the traditional technique that he still utilized. Darboven contrasts this analytical portrait of the Spanish master with a conceptual picture of her own approach. Like Picasso, she continuously repeats and reinterprets the defining elements of her own style. But she has transcended the constraints of serial, visual notation and developed a music which is at once clearly identifiable as Hanne Darboven’s work and indicative of the limitless possibilities of her oeuvre as a whole to reinvent itself time and again. Thus, the very notion of originality stands at the core of Hommage à Picasso.
Hanne Darboven: Hommage à Picasso was curated by Dr. Valerie Hillings, Assistant Curator, Guggenheim Museum New York. A German and an English language catalog will be published on the occasion of the exhibition, with essays by Valerie Hillings, Wolfgang Marx, Svenja Gräfin von Reichenbach, Anne Rorimer, and a conversation between Gerd de Vries and Sibylle Omlin; it includes a CD with the recording of Hanne Darboven’s Opus 60 and can be purchased at the price of 38 euros.
Hanne Darboven’s Gregorian Calendar is Edition No. 34 of Deutsche Guggenheim. It is a Diavographie from 2005, in a limited edition of 60 numbered and signed pieces + X a.p., which can be purchased exclusively at the MuseumShop for 500 euros.
The show is accompanied by numerous special events such as lectures, films, music and a children’s program. Free guided tours are offered daily at 6 p.m. The supporting program is rounded off by the well-known Lunch Lectures, Wednesdays at 1 p.m., and the Keynote Tours, Sundays at 11:30 a.m. Please check the enclosed material for more detailed information.
>> Download this Pressrelease (PDF)
Read following articles about the exhibition at www.db-artmag.com, Deutsche Bank's online art magazine:
on view // Hanne Darboven "Hommage à Picasso"
news // Darboven Edition
Images of the exhibition
are available online at www.photo-files.de/guggenheim in a 300 dpi quality.
Further information at
Deutsche Guggenheim
Contact: Sara Bernshausen
Phone: +49-30-202093-14
Fax: +49-30-202093-20
email: berlin.guggenheim@db.com
Internet: www.deutsche-guggenheim.de
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