Hanne Darboven.
Correspondence May 19, 2017 - August 27, 2017
Hamburger Bahnhof - National Gallery of the Present

On the occasion of the donation of 15 important works and work complexes by Hanne Darboven to the Nationalgalerie by Susanne and Michael Liebelt, the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Aktuell - Berlin is dedicating an exhibition to this important representative of conceptual art in Germany. The Nationalgalerie therefore has works from all phases of the artist's work, who died in 2009.

The exhibition “Hanne Darboven. Correspondences” shows drawings, numerical constructions and serial image sequences by the artist, which were created in an examination of Minimal and Conceptual Art. These works are combined with mailings from 1967 to 1975, revealing the establishment and maintenance of a dense network of artists, curators and friends. Before her death, the artist selected around 1,150 letters, postcards, sketches, plans and photographs from this period and made them available to the public under the title “Correspondence”. This collection from the Hanne Darboven Foundation provides previously unknown insights into the artist's work process and the art system around 1970. After the correspondence of the "Korrespondenz" was published in 2016 in a facsimile edition made possible by the Liebelt Foundation Hamburg, the collection is now exhibited for the first time.

In this way, a figure comes to the fore who, along with the artist, collector and composer, has previously been in the shadows: Hanne Darboven, the letter writer and her unbridled passion for writing. The exhibition shows a selection of the mailings received by Hanne Darboven or written by her to long-time friends. Hundreds of letters were exchanged in particular between Carl Andre, Roy Colmer, Isi Fiszman, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and members of the family.

There are also messages from and to colleagues (Daniel Buren, Gilbert & George, Reiner Ruthenbeck or Ruth Vollmer), collectors (Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Karl Ströher, Mia and Martin Visser), curators (Johannes Cladders, Douglas Crimp, Kasper König, Lucy Lippard), gallery owners (Leo Castelli, Konrad Fischer or Adriaan Van Ravesteijn from Art & Project). The exhibition takes this postal exchange as an opportunity to also ask about artistic correspondence with the correspondent friends. Darboven's works from the collections of the Nationalgalerie, the Kupferstichkabinett and the art library of the National Museums in Berlin are supplemented by works by fellow artists such as Carl Andre, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner with whom the artist was in close contact.

In addition to the artist's central creative processes, the exhibition also documents the differentiation of the art system since the late 1960s. The letters talk, for example, about conceptual art with its dematerialization tendencies, about performative writing processes, authorial polyphony, the creation of identity through memories, a totalization of work in times of post-material structures, but also about the joy of writing and the onset of globalization of art - subject areas that today are artistic as well as socially current. These topics of “correspondence” were distributed across eight thematically structured rooms and interlaced with works by Hanne Darboven and her correspondents so that visitors and readers can enter, move around and get on at different points and on different levels , to explore the interconnections and overlays of correspondence, artistic writing and independent wall or floor works.