Jorinde Voigt mines complexity and velocity of her environment through abstract configurations

With reflections (literal and hand-written) elaborating on mental and physical relations, the works invite us to navigate the artist’s evolving terrain by hiking, swimming, and reading along with her—over hills and bodies, through water and fish gills, and into hairy, humanlike orifices. - Barbara MacAdam

Mid-career, Berlin-based artist Jorinde Voigt, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, works primarily in the field of drawing. A highly cultivated person, she studied cello and has read philosophy for a long time. Her work, regularly abstract, has been compared to a musical score; in the beautiful geometric drawings on show in “Trust and Rain,” there are often written notations on the side, covering a range of topics and indicating that, for Voigt, the process of image-making is importantly intellectual in nature. Drawing is a transparent medium, and in the artist’s hands it becomes a way of thinking as well as a visual expression. It can be said that in art abstraction requires, to some degree, abstract consideration, and the Germanic accomplishment in philosophy accompanies this artist’s manner of thinking. That being indicated, Voigt’s art cannot be reduced to an intellectual exercise; she is an image-maker of considerable achievement, pushing forward the long European history of abstract art.

In Trust and Rain in June I (2020-21), Voigt uses gold leaf (a favored material), pastel, oil chalk, and India ink to create an image that, on first glance, seems to connect with the sea. An oval-shaped line, with touches of red on the far edge of either side, contains a massed group of polyp-shaped forms, often also touched with red. Throughout patterns of straight white lines, a kind of downpour of rain, cover the background of the entire piece. This is a more organic work, in contrast with the group of geometric drawings lining the gallery corridor. It might be a jellyfish during a rainstorm, but that reading would force the image into a figurative genre, not something that Voigt does. Instead, the image is suggestive of schema that move beyond the nonobjective, as can happen with such art. The transparency of the drawing, both in its materials and in its gestalt, leaves Voigt’s audience wondering about the ability of abstraction to communicate with several voices, including that of representation.

The suite of smaller, vertically aligned abstract drawings following the length of the gallery hall are notable for their formal cohesion. In Sara’s Question XIII (2020), a group of angular parallelograms, variously colored--reddish orange, green, black, pink, yellow--build a tower of connecting hard-edge forms. This motif is repeated throughout the body of work. The particular image described satisfies the viewer’s need for a nonobjective image to hold its own in a formal sense. There is measure to the drawing--a sense of equal weight given to the part and the whole. As a result, the composition demonstrates a sense of propriety and order, despite the difference of its components and their sides of unequal length. Maybe that’s the key to the artist’s success: a combination of slight disarray that embellishes and animates her overall sense of rightness. In another drawing, titled Referenzialitaet (2020-21), there is a rounded component, colored blue on the top and blue and yellow on the bottom; the rest of the structure is composed of triangles in yellow, gray, blue, and pink. The English translation of the title, as abstract as the visual work itself, is “Referentiality.” The word is likely key to Voigt’s creativity, which describes so well the relations between the parts and the whole.

Voigt is also a sculptor. She has two pieces in the show. Betrachtung/Contemplation (2020), created with thin lines of gold-plated brass, offers two cones in outline, one issuing upward and the other moving toward the floor, that have a shared middle. Within the pyramidal shapes, curving lines of brass animate an otherwise straight-line structure. Somehow, the perfect weight of the forms and their proportions makes one think of architecture: the design of a cathedral. The title, in alignment with the sculpture, indicates the beauty of thought. There is a beautifully rational element to much of Voigt’s art, which distances it from the intuitive, regularly expressionist art we often find here in America. She is a cerebral person with remarkable visual skills. So her work cannot be seen merely as examples of theory. Instead, it is poised in a notable place where what we see and what we think merge. As a result, Voigt’s feeling for form and the ideas she takes interest in occupy a space in which art and meditation influence each other--equally, in a memorable fashion. 

David Nolan Gallery has moved uptown to a space once occupied by the legendary Bykert Gallery, which launched the careers of such pivotal modern artists as Dorothea Rockburne, Chuck Close, and Barry Le Va. Townhouse elegant, the gallery provides a sense of intimacy that allows viewers to see individual works both up close and together—that is, as an environment. It works particularly well with this show, titled The State of Play, since it involves, as Jorinde Voigt’s work often does, an excursion through a drawn landscape, allowing for motion and reflection, seeing the ending in the beginning and back again.

For the past decade, Jorinde Voigt has been creating large-scale drawings on paper, using traditional materials such as ink, oil stick, pencil, watercolor, and, more recently, collage. In the drawings that she did before incorporating collage, the artist combined line and text to diagram both factual and fictive activities, such as the flight of eagles, geographical directions, wind patterns, rotations, shifting horizon lines, top-ten pop charts, kisses, and electrical currents. Whirling across the paper, the sinuous patterns of lines and arrows—some of which may overlap—mark relentless change as well as convey the potential for chaos and ecstasy that resides within any system. Classification and pandemonium are inseparable. It is on the porous border of this vast abyss—what is called “infinity”—that Voigt investigates the caesuras between perception and knowledge, form and dissolution. One of the guiding principles behind the drawings is the application of rigorous procedures: algorithms to decide the direction of a line or the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of lines branching off the initial one. Chance and persistence are essential. The turbulent networks of lines transform the paper into both the artist’s imaginative space and a visual map of the movements of various elements in time.

One of the best stands is that of David Nolan, who is dedicated solely to the work of Jorinde Voigt. Starting with the lineargraphic graphic and gestural approaches of the learned musician to Beethoven's sonatas, the small retrospective extends to the golden and midnight blue shimmering images of 2018 and a cycle of works, the Roland Barthes "fragments of a language of love" in ciphers, patterns, Dynamograms, transmits things and signs: One sees in these works the emergence of a very own, eigenwelt language, from which one can only read fragments, whose forms one still understands as pictures of order, dissolution, hesitation, Accelerate, shrink, calculate, attractiveness. The beauty of harmonious parallel lines meets the beauty of a completely knotted chaos, heating the form to break-ins of deadly coldness, expeditionary troops of figures and drawings and notes marching through mental landscapes, diagrams turn into hilly landscapes, half-spoken words disappear in a stream of lines and numbers in particular, lines run as high-voltage lines over threedimensional shapes reminiscent of extraterrestrial body parts.

David Nolan Gallery
Galleries Section, Booth 707
With works by Jorinde Voigt

The prolific Berlin-based artist Jorinde Voigt holds the title for most chromatically pleasing works at the fair. To achieve the effervescent turmeric yellow of her Immersive Integral Firm Radiance V (2018–19)—a painting-drawing hybrid that incorporates gold leaf, pastel, and graphite—Voigt submerged the entire sheet of paper in a dish of India ink. The work’s “immersive color,” as David Nolan Gallery director George Newall described it, is an effect enhanced not only by the artist’s painted frame, but also by the gallery’s decision to decorate the booth in a soothing teal color. This and similarly energetic, abstract compositions are on offer for $60,000, while a larger showstopper like Immersive Integral Zenith XVII (2018), which seems indebted to the mysterious symbolism of Hilma af Klint, goes for $105,000. These powerful colors add another compelling and strangely spiritual dimension to Voigt’s expansive explorations of drawing, which seek to “map ethereal phenomena,” Newall said. Drawings of this ilk from the early aughts round out the presentation, and seem to presage the more recent works.

Berlin-based artist Jorinde Voigt is recognized for the luminosity of her cerebral, abstract drawings, which feature mathematical equations and annotations that explore her hermetic belief systems.

In Integral, the conclusions she draws are of a decidedly more physical nature. The form of a torus—a wide, ring shape similar to a life preserver—is a repeating motif throughout many of the works on view and a shape that suggests infinity.