Jorinde Voigt

Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch is delighted to show current works by Jorinde Voigt. The artist’s conceptual drawings and collages are based on an encoded form of notation used to transpose the phenomena of our world into visual compositions. No matter how complex the processes, an order will be found for them within the artist’s systems.

Voigt’s works are spaces for inner images. They fluctuate between representational and abstract depictions, yet always refer to something concrete: a word, an imagination, an idea or an experience. The artist feels her way through personal perceptual processes in her small- and large- format works, studies and individual sheets, designing universal models of thought which can adopt highly unusual traits on paper.

The drawings from the group of works Superpassion (2013/14) take up Voigt’s investigations into philosophical and literary works. Already, what began with ’s essay “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments” has led her to artistic debate with Schopenhauer, Epicure, Goethe and C.G. Jung. In Superpassion the artist takes ’s book “Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy” from 1982 as the starting point for a visualisation of spontaneous image-finding processes: the artist marks passages in Luhmann’s text that trigger intuitive associations during the reading process. In a second step she notes down these fragments using pencil on paper and outlines forms that could be considered as representative of the context adopted. Subsequently, she cuts out the areas, gilds them and puts them back into their original places. Then she reworks this drawing using watercolours, pastel chalks and oil crayons. Voigt combines this technique reminiscent of intarsia work with hand-written notations: spatial and temporal parameters locate the areas reflecting her subjective reading process within an objective system of orientation that she calls a “matrix”.

The minimalist Wave, Cloud and Light Studies (2014) were produced in Tulum, Mexico. Here, Voigt recorded directly what she could see in her surroundings. At the very time when she fixed a momentary recording, the water and the air were already reforming. The artist outlined every motif several times on the paper, accentuating the different forms with white and gold-leaf. In addition, she provides each silhouette with a number in order to document the exact sequence of her impressions. The features that Voigt considers essential to the coastal town are manifest through variation and repetition.

By contrast, the Studies on Concentration (2014) appear less contemplative but are extremely focused. The sheets are filled with innumerable arrows, which come together, drift apart and then apparently return to one another. The artist designs expansive loops and floating whirlpools in the compositions of these watercolour drawings. Embedded in her ever recurrent system of notation, Voigt generates pulsating structures that obey their own dynamics.

The works of the artist (born in Frankfurt am Main in 1977) – who lives in and was awarded the 5th Drawing Prize of the Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation in 2012 – are represented in collections including the Centre Pompidou Paris, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Bundeskunstsammlung Bonn, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Kunsthaus Zürich and the State Collections of Graphic Art, Munich. Her works can also be seen currently in the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome (until 9th March).