Hanne Darboven starb mit 67 Jahren

Hanne Darboven, a German pioneer of Conceptual art, has died at the age of sixty-seven. Although the artist passed away on March 9 outside of Hamburg, her death was not known until March 13. “Hanne Darboven’s art was never plainly accessible,” writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Holger Liebs, recalling her “thousands, sometimes ten thousand hand-written pages, each furnished with a personal musical note, individually framed and quasi-tiled on the wall.” Darboven first participated in Documenta at the fifth edition in 1972 in Kassel. In 2002 at Documenta 11, her monumental Kontrabasssolo, opus 45 was a highlight of the exhibition and spanned three stories inside the Fridericianum. Despite the opaqueness of the artist’s installations, writes Liebs, Darboven was “driven” by the effort to be understood and to propagate education for all. “What does it help if only an elite group deals with art,” Darboven once asked, “if for the others nothing is done [to help them] understand what it’s about?”