Das Jahr 1970

Hanne Darboven is one of the most prominent artists of the German postwar era. She has won acclaim for her minimalist, large-scale installations, consisting of handwritten tables full of numbers. For this out-and-out conceptualist, the numbers represented something more than a universal, artificial language. They were also something that allowed her to record the passage of time.

It was at the end of the 1960s that Darboven developed her own method of transcribing time. Her idiosyncratic system was always written down by hand on cross-ruled graph paper. The calendar sequence has served as the basis for most of her installations, where the hub consists of the present date. The various numerical combinations are the result of complex additions or multiplications that stem from personally developed sequences. Mounted alongside one another, the many numerical solutions form intricate patterns of the time that has elapsed.

Das Jahr 1970 (The Year 1970) consists of forty-two framed pictures that in tandem summarize the entire year. The work can be seen as an attempt to split up and structure time. The result is a sort of abstract diary, where the boundary between the subjective and the objective has dissolved.

Darboven defined her works as a form of text, and in the 1970s she developed her works in a more literary direction. She began now to transcribe texts, which were interpreted and broken down into structuralist skeletons. She was particularly interested in authors who like herself explore the connection between being, time, and existence.