JORINDE VOIGT: Considerations in the Now

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present Considerations in the Now, an exhibition of recent drawings by Jorinde Voigt, along with earlier large-scale collage-based work from 2012. On view from May 4 through June 11 – with an opening reception on May 12 – this will be the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Working principally within the medium of drawing, Voigt’s works have been likened to musical scores, scientific diagrams, or notational thought models. Using a precisely coded system of mark making, the artist gives pictorial form to an array of natural or psychological phenomena. In recent series, Voigt has applied her unique visual method in the deconstruction of works of literature and philosophical texts, highlighting specific words and passages that resonate with her. Voigt deems that language alone fails to adequately describe the complexities of what she perceives around her, and it is in her art that she finds a means to visually express her personal experience of the world.

The works in the exhibition demonstrate a new level of introspection for the artist, and find her engaging with elemental human experiences and yearnings. Her subjects include an analysis of the accumulated moments within a day, the desire to fly, and the human body. While making her series “Observations in the Now” (2015), the artist was intensely engaged with the writings of C. G. Jung, and in particular, his studies in human development and the concept of the unconscious. Using Jung’s psychological theories as a conceptual framework, Voigt approached the drawings in this group as thought diagrams, choosing certain colors – pinks and reds and greens – for their association with different emotional states.

The theme of flight has been present in Voigt’s work since 2007 when she made a drawing about the flight path of an eagle. More recently, the artist’s investigation into historical depictions of wings and flying led her to the work of Pietro Cavallini, whose fresco of The Last Judgment (c. 1293) comprises a host of angels within a highly specific organizational scheme. Inspired by the abstracted representation of the angels’ wings, Voigt made her monumental gold-leaf triptych, 5 Cavallini – Sequences (2015) which will be presented in the main gallery.

This interest in flying next led her to Der Heimatplanet (The Home Planet, 1988), a popular German book that documents the experiences of astronauts in space. Voigt recently rediscovered this book, having first read it as a child, and the unexpectedly poetic statements quoted from engineers onboard the spacecraft resonated with her. Of his experiences in space, one crewmember named Alexey Leonov observed the following: “What struck me most was the silence. It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible.”

This deeply personal narrative style, which touches on bodily experience, takes another form in Voigt’s most recent work, März (2016), in which her physical form is the raw subject matter. Sitting atop a vast sheet of paper, the artist documents the areas in which her body comes into contact with it. Using her pencil-drawn outlines as precise guides, she applies pigment powder to form the colored areas with a cloth. As in her earlier series, “Observations in the Now,” the artist uses a color spectrum to describe her inner emotional states, guided by subjective associations as she decodes her own perception.

Works by the Berlin-based Jorinde Voigt (b. 1977, Frankfurt am Main) are represented in a number of major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus, Zurich; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; and Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, among others. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2015); Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2014); and Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2013) all of which were accompanied by extensive publications.