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March 10 – May 9 2021
You can find more information for your visit here.
»My secret is that I do not have one.«
HANNE DARBOVEN, 1991
Hanne Darboven – The Rainmaker
MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg
VIRTUAL OPENING with ARD weather presenter Claudia Kleinert and MKM director Walter Smerling, who curated the show.
(audio: German)
Hanne Darboven – A Portrait of the Artist.
© Walter Smerling, WDR, 1991
(audio: German)
Hanne Darboven, who called herself a writer and composer, is one of the most important artists of the 21st century. As the centre of her work is the writing and making visible of time as a possibility of experiencing and coping with reality. “My work is a recording in the sense of existence, it is a working through” was formulated by Darboven as early as 1966 and throughout her life she developed her very own contribution to Conceptual Art and Minimal Art. Until her death in 2009, the artist lived and worked in seclusion in Hamburg in a studio that resembled a Chamber of Curiosities.
The MKM is showing four major work cycles from the Ströher Collection, comprising some 2,000 individual works. They are exemplary of Hanne Darboven’s thought and work and are supplemented by biographical insights. The central work The Rainmaker (1985) is on show for the first time in its entirety with all 1,386 sheets after round about 20 years.
Obsessive, highly complex, precise, and bound to the present – this is how Hanne Darboven’s work can be described. Starting from the current date, the artist has created her own system of order consisting of combinations of numbers, calendar pages, handwritten documents and collected visual material. Her serial series of sheets, which fill entire museum walls, become a physically tangible storage medium for time, current events and her own biography. Darboven’s elegant, androgynous appearance with its characteristic short haircut was also a style-forming element.
»And finally I came up with the daily data, since one deals daily with the sense and nonsense of things.«
HANNE DARBOVEN, 1966
English