JORINDE VOIGT
HILLS AND TURNS

KÖNIG BERLIN
2 DECEMBER 2017 – 7 JANUARY 2018

The works 45 Hills and 40 Hills (Vertical Turn), the eight-part series Yellow Hills, and the ten-part series The Scope (all 2017) are on display in a colorful architecture custom-built for the show. Voigt’s hills are a reference to an archetypical way to represent an event. The suspense curve, originally a diagram, traces the dramaturgical arc of action. This inserts a temporal dimension into the picture, making it legible from left to right. In the various works and series, individual events generated by a structure of repetition and variation form entire event landscapes rendered as hill sceneries (The Scope). In the overarching compositional ensemble, the hill thus emerges as both the prominent element and what obscures other elements. It marks an event of perception and by the same token the perception of an event. The arrangement of these hills is mirrored in the upper part of each sheet—it is reflectively transformed into its opposite. The individual color ranges of the works and series lend them an atmospheric “tinge.” Blue, for example, has a calming effect and can be associated with water and night, whereas red and yellow stimulate the eye. Other visual elements that appear throughout include cloud-shaped inlays that gather around the hilltops and successively dissipate, as in Chinese landscape paintings (Yellow Hills), as well as a multiplicity of rotating and vertical dashes that establish a connection between above and below while also being a performative expression of the simultaneity of different stances in composition (45 Hills, 40 Hills (Vertical Turn) and Yellow Hills) Colors as well as forms are subject to the artist’s spontaneous decisions. In that sense, the landscapes may be read as “cartographies of the moment,” as Voigt has put it. The exhibition architecture’s monochrome walls painted in dark blue and a pinkish yellow echo the color ranges of the notations. Set off from the gallery wall, they also provide a sheltered space for the works that extends the atmospheres immanent to them into the third dimension.

FEATURED ARTIST

JORINDE VOIGT

Jorinde Voigt (b. in 1977 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg, Germany. She graduated from Katharina Sieverding’s master class at the UdK Universität der Künste, Berlin in 2004. Afterwards, from 2014 – 2019, she was professor of Conceptual Drawing and Painting at AdBK Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, Germany. Since 2019, she is professor of Conceptual Drawing and Painting at HfBK Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, Germany.

Jorinde Voigt’s drawings and sculptural works develop rigorous, idiosyncratic systems to depict how one’s inner world – such as personal experience, emotion, and memory – ...
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