Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Hanne Darboven’s multipart work Kalendergeschichten, which is installed at our Brussels gallery. Darboven, a German conceptual artist, is best known for her large-scale, minimalist works, and her meditation on time, a theme fundamental to her practice. In the mid-1960s, Darboven moved to New York, where she grew interested in conceptual art and developed a fascination with numerical sequences. 

This interest became foundational to her work, and much of her work evidences a visual vocabulary derived from numerical sequences of four to six digits, drawn from the standard Gregorian calendar. Of her use of numbers Darboven said, “I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing…I choose numbers because they are so constant, confined, and artistic. Numbers are probably the only real discovery of mankind.”

Kalendergeschichten features a series of 212 drawings made in the 1970s and framed in groups of four, which are displayed wrapped around the walls of the gallery. Emblematic of Darboven’s calendar works, this piece provides a system for meditating on the passage of time, while also reflecting on the clarity of time’s inherent order, endowing the temporal with a concrete form.

Hanne Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich, Germany and died in 2009 in Hamburg, Germany. She participated in numerous exhibitions at major museums in Europe and North America, including “Hanne Darboven, Bücher 1966-2002″ at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster (2002); “Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975″ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1995-96); and “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information” at the Kunsthalle Bern (1969). She also participated in Documentas 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 11 (2002), in Kassel; the 1973 São Paulo Bienal; and the 1982 Venice Biennale. Her work is included in a number of permanent collections including the Schaulager, Basel; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.