Jorinde Voigt is a German artist best known for large-scale drawings that develop complex notation systems derived from music, philosophy, and phenomenology.
[2] 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,[3] namely the event scores and visual artworks of the 20th-century avant-garde such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis;[4] the algorithmic patterns of Hanne Darboven;[5] and the procedural parameters of Sol Lewitt.
[6] 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.
[13] 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.
[15] 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.”[16] 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.
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.