Variation no. 26

The numerical and script systems developed by German-born Conceptual artist Hanne Darboven visualized time—discrete and flowing, rational and arbitrary, experienced and hypothetical, empty and all-encompassing—and propelled her art to international acclaim. Attracted to numbers for their artistic and abstract qualities, Darboven worked coolly and serially. She developed performable musical notations based on the calendar; she hand-wrote standardized lines of cursive script that served as physical markers of time’s passage; she rigorously composed found and re-photographed images from a wide variety of sources. The title of Darboven’s 1976 work Variation No. 26 refers to musical variations, as the artist believed her numerical constructions to function “in terms of progressions or reductions that were akin to musical variations” (I. Bloom, “Hanne Darboven,” Frieze, Issue 109, September 2007, n.p. [accessed online]). In Variation No. 26, Darboven serially types out the numbers from one to ten in German, crossing out swathes of spelled-out numbers and labeling them with handwritten digits in accordance with her opaque personal system. The work’s sense of impenetrable order is underscored by the meaningless calligraphic script in the backdrop. Moving to New York in 1966 after training in Hamburg, Darboven soon established herself as an important figure in the Conceptual vanguard alongside friends and colleagues Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth, and Mel Bochner. The artist has been honored with solo exhibitions at institutions including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kunstverein Hamburg, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Dia Center in New York, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.