David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Jorinde Voigt’s first exhibition in the United States. The exhibition will feature drawings from 2008 to 2012, and two sculptural installations.

The works of Jorinde Voigt (b. 1976, German) present a unique visual language representing algorithmic systems composed of objective and subjective elements. Aiming to make the invisible visible, Voigt reveals the complex world in which we live, a world permeated by complementary, overlapping, and conflicting forces. Music, weather, geography, literature, and philosophy are among the subjects that inspire Voigt’s lyrical drawings, all of which she renders into a dizzying maelstrom of lines and notations as one thought is linked to the next.

The characteristics of the concepts themselves often inform the way Voigt chooses to represent them on paper. In her Küssen (Kissing) drawings, the notations fan out of a central point, resembling the gesture of a blown kiss. Voigt constructs compositions that are unmistakably representative of musical scores in her Symphonic Areas series, and she renders measures of rotations and frequency in circular wave-like diagrams.

The earliest series presented in the exhibition is STAAT/Random (State/Random) from 2008. It consists of eleven diptychs where Voigt investigates the relationship between variables that seem to have little in common, such as an eagle’s flight path, kissing, and acoustic pulses. Voigt forms relationships among them through a combination of sweeping, gestural lines representing the flight of a bird through the air and carefully measured notations drawn with a compass or straight-edge to denote quantitative data such as temperature changes and cardinal directions (N, S, E, W). There is always a duality to Voigt’s process: order and chaos, lines hand-drawn versus mechanically rendered, quantitative versus qualitative analyses, objective and subjective realities.

Sculptures representing systems of thought through coding, inscription, and movement will also be on view in this exhibition. From 2009 to 2010, Voigt visited botanic gardens in every city to which she traveled and became fascinated by the efforts made to identify, class, and display plants. Voigt created an algorithm by which to represent the characteristics of the plants, such as color and height, and produced a series of sculptures entitled Botanic Code consisting of bands of painted aluminum rods that lean against a wall. With Botanic Code, Voigt translates her sensorial experience into visual code. In the series entitled Grammar (2010), sixty-four airplane propellers in groups of eight are inscribed with combinations of phrases conjugating the German verb lieben (to love). They turn at different speeds and in varying directions, linking motion and time to the structure of language. Works from both series will be on view.