Jorinde Voigt is a German artist, best-known for large-scale drawings that develop complex notation systems derived from music, philosophy, and phenomenology. She is a professor of Conceptual Drawing and Painting at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Voigt lives and works in Berlin.
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, namely the event scores and visual artworks of the 20th-century avant-garde such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis; the algorithmic patterns of Hanne Darboven; and the procedural parameters of Sol Lewitt. Yet despite these comparisons, Voigt’s work differs markedly from this lineage, particularly because her rigorous systems emerge from how the inner world—such as personal experience, emotion, and memory intersect with external conditions. Voigt has described such a process as providing “instructions for the imagination.”
In 2002, Voigt turned away from the medium of photography and began to make the drawings that she is best known for, which she has alternately described over the years as “projection surfaces, visualized thought models, scientific experimental designs, notations, scores and diagrams. The artist developed her specific symbolic system in the series Notations Florida and Indonesia, both from 2003. According to art historian Astrid Schmidt-Burkhardt, the sixty ink drawings that comprise Notations Florida, “already contain all the registers of perception that would also distinguish her later works.” The resulting drawings convey a series of the artist’s impressions when traveling from Orlando to Miami. As Voigt explains, “I still took stock of situations, but the difference was that I no longer pressed the shutter but rather took notes. In this way, pictures emerged that could no longer be classified as perspectival; rather, they reflected the juxtaposition and the simultaneity of what I experienced.”
Further cycles of work emerged from the perception study developed in this early series. Although formally and conceptually diverse, each of these work cycles shares an interest in making visible that which is “behind” things and capturing the simultaneity of experience through markings on paper.
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 comprising picture and text elements. 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—each one capturing a specific gaze—onto each sheet of paper, so that the collages resemble scientific tables. To make the works, Voigt cut silhouettes from colored paper that corresponded 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. Poet and critic John Yau writes, “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.” With color choices and notations dictated by the very act of looking itself, the drawings appear as a mental construct with which to investigate human perception, raising questions about language, cognition, intuition, and association.
