Dirimart is pleased to announce Infinite Rhythm, Jorinde Voigt’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition presents Voigt’s latest series Rhythm (2022), alongside works from the series The Sum of All Best Practices (2021/22), Fugue (2021), Immersion (2020), Infinite (2020), and Double Infinite (2019).
Jorinde Voigt’s philosophically inflected artistic practice has engaged questions of perception, sensation, and presence to articulate graphic systems that depict how one’s inner world—such as personal experience, emotion, and memory—intersects with external conditions. Voigt’s intuitive and expressive works evolve from rigorous meditative and observational processes that seek to capture the complexity and velocity of her environment, whether through existing natural forms as in The Sum of All Best Practices (2021/22) or through the abstract configurations of her latest series Rhythm.
In her Rhythm works, which form the core of her exhibition at Dirimart, Voigt creates lines in three dimensions: slicing, cutting, repositioning, and layering colored paper and existing drawn lines into new configurations. While some compositions appear textured and graphic, others take on delicate shapes that subtly evoke landscapes, blossoms, or elaborate ribbons. Voigt describes Rhythm as a kind of push-and-pull between the whole and its constituent parts. Multiple co-existing rhythms come together to create an organic unit formed through processes of destruction and reconstruction. The materials themselves yield numerous questions about limitations, borders, and resilience, which can be expanded in scope to think more broadly about the interlocking rhythms of our world. According to Ineta Kivle, rhythm is a pulse that “organizes the order of the mind-body, insinuates social processes, and determines nature“ (“Search for Stability: Rhythm in the Philosophies of Husserl, Deleuze & Guattari,” Rhuthmos, 8 September 2021). How might we bring competing rhythms—whether on a personal, social, political, or ecological level—into a state of equilibrium? How can an attention to rhythm in its most expanded sense show us that this balance is not actually stasis, but a constant negotiation between shifting poles of actions, affinities, and alliances? How might this notion of rhythm be a tool to build meaningful worlds—to elicit empathy, intersubjectivity, and a sense of belonging?
Sum of All Best Practices and Fugue further illustrate Voigt’s current investigations of the space-making qualities of drawing in three-dimensions. The work considers how every form of the present speaks of its own past—and of its survival. In this series, Voigt creates cutouts of individual leaves found in Berlin parks and brings them together to form topographic assemblages that explore the potentially infinite ways in which a single specific thing can be embedded into a specific complexity. In Fugue, Voigt cuts smoothly undulating and rippling lines into colored paper that she assembles into a luminous, musical landscape.
Immersion, on view in the showroom, takes as its starting point the process of perception itself. In this series, Voigt deals less with exactly what we perceive than how we perceive. Her inquiry into the nature of perception seeks to develop the appropriate forms to understand the inner constitution of archetypal images, that which is behind what we see, and how such images might be experienced or shared collectively. The torus appears throughout the works in this series, a geometric form explored by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to illustrate his notion of “extimacy” (extimité), a neologism that combines the terms exterior (exterieur) and intimacy (intimité). Voigt’s variegated landscapes of de-centered, ex-centric forms depict the unconscious as an inter-subjective rather than purely interior structure, something that although we may be immersed within will always remain outside of us, as something other, as Lacan writes in The Seminar: Book VII (1992), “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.”
Adapted from Jesi Khadivi’s essays “A Curve That Folds Without Closing” (2022) and “Something Strange at the Heart of Me” (2018)
Jorinde Voigt (b. 1977, Frankfurt am Main) is a leading conceptual artist based in Berlin. She studied with Katharina Sieverding at Universität de Künste, Berlin, graduating with her Master of Fine Arts in 2004. From 2014 to 2019, she taught at Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, and today she is a Professor of Conceptual Drawing and Painting at University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She has participated in biennials worldwide, most notably the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2011); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); Biennale de Lyon (2017); and Sharjah Biennial (2017). Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented by Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (2020); BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2020); The Menil Collection, Houston (2019); Horst Janssen-Museum, Oldenburg (2019); Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2017); Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2016); Kunsthalle Krems (2015); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2014); the Langen Foundation, Neuss (2013); Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag (2010); as well as Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston (2022). Voigt’s work is included in the permanent collections of notable institutions worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Bundeskunstsammlung, Bonn; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; Kunsthalle Praha Collection, Prague; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, among others.
