Jorinde Voigt

Jorinde Voigt (born 1977) is a German visual artist whose large-scale ink drawings employ bespoke notation systems inspired by musical scores, philosophical concepts, and phenomenological methods.^[1] She is a professor of conceptual drawing and painting at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She lives and works in Berlin.^[2]

Jorinde Voigt
Born	1977 (age 47–48)
Citizenship	German
Alma mater	Berlin University of the Arts
Website	jorindevoigt.com

Work

Voigt's large-scale drawings often emerge from a system of guidelines and rules, and therefore her work has drawn comparisons to Minimalist and Conceptual artists,^[3] namely the event scores and visual artworks of the 20th-century avant-garde such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis;^[4] the algorithmic patterns of Hanne Darboven;^[5] and the procedural parameters of Sol Lewitt.^[6] According to art historian Astrid Schmidt-Burkhardt, Voigt does not consider John Cage or other conceptual artists as role models but integrates influences that fascinate her.^[7] Voigt has described this process as providing "instructions for the imagination."^[8]

In 2002, Voigt moved away from photography and began to make drawings, which she has described as projection surfaces, visualised thought models, scientific experimental designs, notations, scores, and diagrams.^[9][10] In 2003, she developed a symbolic system in the series, Notations Florida and Indonesia. According to Schmidt-Burkhardt, the sixty ink drawings which comprise Notations Florida, "already contain all the registers of perception that would also distinguish her later works."^[11] These drawings record the artist's impressions when traveling from Orlando to Miami. Voigt has explained that she "no longer pressed the shutter but rather took notes", producing images that could not be classified as perspectival and instead reflected the juxtaposition and simultaneity of her experiences.^[12]

Further work cycles developed from the study of perception were established in this early series.^[13] Although formally and conceptually diverse, these cycles share an interest in representing underlying structures and capturing the simultaneity of experience through markings on paper.^[14]

Views on Chinese erotic art: from 16th to 20th century (2011/2012)

The works from this series combine notation and collage techniques to translate images of historic Chinese erotic paintings and prints into diagrams that comprise picture and text elements.^[15] Central to this series is a "visual reading" process, which analyzes images as if they were texts—referencing the Chinese and Japanese painting tradition of capturing a scene in multiple views. Voigt subsumed up to 100 views with each one capturing a specific gaze onto each sheet of paper, so that the collages resemble scientific tables. Voigt made these works by cutting silhouettes from colored paper that correspond in color and profile to a particular element of the composition, such as the shape of a woman's hairdo, a bathtub, or a lover's embrace. The number of silhouettes were determined by how many times she looked at the detail.^[16] Poet and critic John Yau wrote, "by unraveling the erotic views into their constituent parts, the artist essentially undresses the encounter, turning it into a collection of visual and written data."^[17]

Piece for Words and Views (2012) Love as passion: On the Codification of Intimacy (2013/2014)

This 36-part series marks a radical shift in Voigt's practice. While earlier works developed notation systems that visually translated the perception of objects or situations, Piece for Words and Views is the first work cycle in which Voigt concretely attempts to find images which correspond to internal processes. With this shift in Voigt's work, finding forms that correlate to imagination, memory, experience and emotion moved to the forefront of her practice. Piece for Words and Views explores how, when reading, words have the capacity to produce images in the reader's imagination. The series transforms specific words from A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes into both abstract and representational imagery. Each mental image receives a specific color and form, which is rendered via contoured drawing on colored vellum. The final drawing is made by collaging the multiple images, forming an ambiguous relation among them.^[18] A similar process is at work in Voigt's 48-part series Love as Passion: On the Codification of Intimacy, which takes responds to Niklas Luhmann's 1982 book by the same name. Each drawing in Codification of Intimacy takes a chapter, passage, or key word that Voigt distilled from Luhman's book as its source. Voigt begins each drawing by marking passages in the text which triggered intuitive associations.

Immersion (2018/2019)

Immersion takes the process of perception itself as its starting point. It deals less with exactly what we perceive than how we perceive. The series seeks to develop appropriate forms to understand the inner constitution of archetypal images, which is behind what we see, and how such images might be experienced or shared collectively. A central element in these works is the torus, a shape that Voigt conceives of as a model for perception, in combination with arrows, axes, and lines. Voigt first began working with these forms in her Lacan Studies from 2016.^[19] She commences each work in the Immersion series by immersing paper in pigment. Each color is selected to denote a particular atmosphere or emotional state.^[20] A large torus figure forms the central element of the composition and in each variation its dimensions morph and rotate. Voigt describes Immersion as a "time-based series", with each piece created one after the other and representing a different moment in time. "When you look at the series as a whole you can see the exact connection between those moments", Voigt explains, "In real life you focus on each moment at a time, and you can't stop and zoom out in order to see the bigger picture."^[21] Another variable element of the compositions are Voigt's use of gold and precious metals. She incorporates metal inlays by cutting out sections of the drawings and gilding them with gold, aluminum, and copper leaf and reintegrating the shapes into their original place in the composition.

Museum collections

Jorinde Voigt's work is held at various collections internationally, including: the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Kupferstichkabinett Berlin; İstanbul Modern; Federal Art Collection (Bundeskunsthalle), Bonn; the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Kunsthaus Zürich; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Norwegian Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and Grafische Sammlung, Munich.^[22]

Exhibitions

• 2019 Wall Drawings Series: Jorinde Voigt, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston^[23]
• 2019 Jorinde Voigt – Universal Turn, Horst-Janssen-Museum, Oldenburg^[24]
• 2018 Jorinde Voigt – Divine Territory, St. Matthäus Church, Berlin^[24]
• 2017 Jorinde Voigt – A New Kind of Joy, Kunsthalle Nürnberg^[23]
• 2014 Jorinde Voigt – Superpassion, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome^[24]
• 2013 Jorinde Voigt – Systematic Notations, Nevada Museum of Art NMA^[24]
• 2011 Jorinde Voigt, Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal^[23]
• 2010 Jorinde Voigt – STAAT / Random I-XI, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag^[24]
• 2009 Jorinde Voigt – Symphonic Area, HDKV Heidelberger Kunstverein^[23]
• 2008 Jorinde Voigt – DUAL / NKV Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden^[24]