12 Facts About Hanne Darboven

Hanne Darboven was a German conceptual artist, best known for her large-scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.

Hanne Darboven grew up in Ronneburg, a southern suburb of Hamburg, as the second of three daughters of Casar Darboven and Kirsten Darboven.

Hanne Darboven's father was a successful and well-to-do businessman in Hamburg; the family brand Darboven coffee is well known in Germany.

Hanne Darboven then moved back to her family home in Hamburg and continued to live and work there among an extraordinary collection of disparate cultural artefacts until her death in 2009.

Similar to On Kawara, Hanne Darboven offered a system to represent time as both the continuous flux of life and clear embracing order.

The monumental work entitled Vier Jahreszeiten, which Hanne Darboven exhibited at Documenta 7 in Kassel, was the first of Hanne Darboven's works to be really permeated with color, introduced into it by the use of kitsch postcards.

Hanne Darboven translated her additive concept of dates into musical scores, in which the digit 1 stands for the note e, 2 for f, 3 for g, etc.

Hanne Darboven's works have been presented in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad.

The exhibition of her two-part work Card Index: Filing Cabinet, simultaneously held in two New York galleries in 1978, was the first time that Hanne Darboven had shown her work in the United States, following a decision to stop exhibiting temporarily in 1976.

Hanne Darboven has since had numerous one-person exhibitions primarily in Europe and North America, including major presentations at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York.

Individual works by Hanne Darboven were already included in the Documenta 5,6 and 7, and in 1982 she represented the Federal Republic of Germany at the Venice Biennale.

Today Hanne Darboven's work is represented by Konrad Fischer Gallery and Spruth Magers.