Jorinde Voigt

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.

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.”

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 Luhmann’s book as its source.

Voigt begins each drawing by marking the passages in the text that triggered intuitive associations.

Immersion takes as its starting point the process of perception itself.

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, that 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.

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.

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.

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 that 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.

Voigt first began working with these forms in her Lacan Studies from 2016.

She begins each work in the Immersion series by immersing paper in pigment.

Each color is selected to denote a particular atmosphere or emotional state.

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.” 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.