Jorinde Voigt: Shadows & Dyads

Jorinde Voigt is a leading conceptual artist based in Berlin, Germany. In her work, Voigt observes and explores the inner processes of perception in relation to various aspects and subjects such as affects and emotions, imagination, memory, sensory experience, natural and cultural phenomena, scientific data, interpersonal actions, and relationships. Often using as her starting point a musical composition or a philosophical text, she creates complex systems of charts, diagrams, and thought models to depict the intersection of subjective, personal experience with seemingly objective external stimuli and to map the natural rhythms that govern our experience of reality.

Voigt understands her artistic practice as a “performative act out of the creative action with the objective to draw spaces of potency within an endless spectrum of possibilities.” Her series of drawings entitled Hills unite the performative characteristics of the creative process to the resulting creation, using the representative formation of earthly hills to develop conceptual fields of activity. Wing-like drawing elements gently nestle into the surfaces of the hills, reminiscent of the intuitive and emotionally inspired artistic gesture that creates them. In these, Voigt establishes a performative language that, in its diversity and consistency, symptomatically corresponds to the impact of the finished work: origin and work are one and the same in terms of form.

Maintaining her conceptual approach, Voigt has been expanding her work beyond the medium of drawing in recent years, including and experimenting with painterly elements, collage, sculpture, design, and music. Independent curator Jesi Khadivi writes regarding Voigt's new series of sculptures, "Although much more formally reduced than many of her previous works, Voigt’s latest sculptural series Dyade nonetheless continues her engagement with how internal and external phenomena shape perception. Constructed from various materials, including copper, gold plated stainless steel, and Corten steel, the sculptures typically comprise two organic, rounded forms, which are either nested into one another or facing in opposite directions...each serving as an uneven mirror to its counterpart. This mirroring effect is enhanced in the copper and golden steel works through their materiality: they do not entirely reflect, but rather absorb and gently distort their surrounding—as well as their own shadows... As implicit in their name, which means 'a group of two things,' 'couple,' or 'pair,' we form a dyad with the work through the act of viewing. In turn, the sculpture itself is a whole that consists of two parts: two lines, two gestures, two movements, two moments in time."

Voigt's work is included in the permanent collections of notable institutions worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Bundeskunstsammlung, Bonn, Germany; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthalle Praha Collection, Prague, Czech Republic; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey; Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway; and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany; among others.

March 23- May 11, 2024

Press Release