Lot Essay
'Born in 1941, the artist grew up in an upper-middle class business family in Hamburg-Harburg. In 1966, while she was still studying the visual arts, she moved to New York for two years, where she got to know Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard and Kasper König, who supported her artistic work. It was in New York, where Conceptual Art and Minimal Art were developing at the time, that she created her first geometrical constructions on graph paper. In 1968, Darboven began numerical additions with calendar dates. The starting point was the cross sum of the date, the so-called K value, which is named after the construction and the boxes which visualise this value' (www.culturebase.net). It was during this year that Darboven created Konstruktion, a monumental work for the time comprising of 31 sheets of ink on paper.