Hanne Darboven (29 April 1941 – 9 March 2009) was a German conceptual artist, best known for her large-scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.

She then moved back to her family home in Hamburg and continued to live and work there among an extraordinary collection of disparate cultural artefacts until her death in 2009.

[3] In the winter of 1966–1967, she met Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Joseph Kosuth, major figures in the then nascent fields of Minimalism and Conceptual art.

These meetings proved pivotal in the development of Darboven's work; soon thereafter, she began her first series of drawings on millimeter paper with lists of numbers, which resulted from complicated additions or multiplications of personally derived numerical sequences based on the four to six digits used to notate the date, month, and year of the standard Gregorian calendar.

Similar to On Kawara, Darboven offered a system to represent time as both the continuous flux of life and clear embracing order.

In the 1970s, Darboven often allied her work, which she considered a form of writing, to the accomplishments of writers such as Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre, directly transcribing quotations or entire passages of their texts, or translating them into patterns.

[10] Reducing the Gregorian calendrical notation to only forty-two denominations for each century,[11] the work weaves together cultural, social, and historical references with autobiographical documents, postcards, pinups of film and rock stars, documentary references to the first and second world wars, geometric diagrams for textile weaving, a sampling of New York doorways, illustrated covers from news magazines, the contents of an exhibition catalogue devoted to postwar European and American art, a kitschy literary calendar, and extracts from some of Darboven's earlier works.

The numerals are filled with a lacelike pattern of white dots and surrounded by a host of colorful details: little blue drawings of diamond rings and stainless steel wristwatches, yin-yang signs, elegant Korean characters.

[15] With the aid of a collaborator, Darboven adapted them into performable compositions for organ, double bass, harpsichord, string quartet, and chamber orchestra.

[19] Darboven has since had numerous one-person exhibitions primarily in Europe and North America, including major presentations at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York.

Individual works by Darboven were already included in the Documenta 5, 6 and 7, and in 1982 she represented the Federal Republic of Germany at the Venice Biennale (along with Gotthard Graubner and Wolfgang Laib).