Taken from the title of a Joni Mitchell song, Jorinde Voigt’s third solo exhibition with Lisson Gallery fuses music and visual art, revealing the artist’s cross-disciplinary and multidimensional approaches to large-format drawing, culminating in a live, immersive performance produced in collaboration with musician Beatrice Dillon. From her organisational systems of scores, notations, chapters and verses to the time signatures, impulse points and rhythmic inscriptions embedded in her drawings, Voigt – who herself trained as a cellist – creates a synaesthetic world through these interrelated compositions.
For her 2017 series Both Sides Now, Voigt depicts a single object turning in space across 10 versions. Part-internal organ, part-abstract concept, the works depict the sensation of being alive and the self-awareness of one’s own heart beating, rather than the muscle or valves themselves. As well as including the temporal and kinetic lines that adorn all of Voigt’s drawn works, the slight shifts in the pastel colours and textures suggest an unknowable entity, while the addition of organic, spreading drips of red shellac ink relate to the branches of a walnut tree that Voigt explored as a child. Another personal connotation hovers over the series Thank You But No Thank You (2017), in which the dark tendrils of black Chinese ink and red acrylic spray paint recall a traumatic experience; perhaps dating from ‘the day before yesterday’ or from ‘tomorrow to infinity’ as the handwritten inscriptions suggest.
An ongoing major body of work is here represented by Song of the Earth: Divine Territory (2106), the third of a proposed cycle of eight inspired by Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde of 1908-09. Here the symbiosis between sound and vision reaches its zenith in Voigt’s spatially ambitious work, combining five monumental drawings into one symphonic panorama in oil chalk, acrylic, pastel and pencil. Last shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin as part of its exhibition, ‘Scores: Works of Music by Visual Artists’ (28 Oct-13 Nov, 2016), this restless landscape is made up of colliding, intersecting and overlapping shapes, each one of which is rotating, expanding, contracting, extending and retracting continuously, according to the lines of notation penned by Voigt. Previous chapters of Song of the Earth have also been shown at Kunstraum Innsbruck in Austria, Manifesta 11 in Switzerland and the Sharjah Biennale in UAE, while the final chapters will be shown as part of the Lyon Biennale in September 2017.
In response to the exhibition, the electronic musician Beatrice Dillon will create an aural soundscape during a live performance on the show’s final day, 24 June. This collaboration follows previous musical transliterations of Voigt’s work but will here foreground chance, improvisation and rhythmic structures apparent in both art forms.
About Jorinde Voigt
Jorinde Voigt channels external pulse and physical movements into complex drawn notations, featuring webs of interconnected thoughts, forms and words. Perhaps stemming from musical scores or codified system of classification, each of her carefully wrought matrices of colour and line combines elements of gestural chance with highly ordered empiricism, gleaned from the worlds of culture, science, music, history and literature. Whether the starting point is Goethe’s Faust, the flight of an eagle (Adler flight), a series of walks, or a simple kiss (Two kissing), Voigt’s multilayered diagrams take into account wind speeds, the Fibonacci sequence of numbering, or her bodily interactions with the oversized sheets of paper being worked upon. The intensity and oft geometric intentionality of her hand-scribed mark-making belies the ethereal intangibility of each work, with splashes of gold or silver refuting obvious figurative comparisons, recalling instead the arcane endeavours of illuminated manuscripts. Her desire to translate, transcribe and record essentially incommunicable phenomena – including musical dynamism, philosophical notions, personal emotions or her own interior monologue – leads, not to chaos, but to a collision between the bygone idealism of compartmentalised modernism and the realisations of a postmodern, universal condition in which everything is interdependent.
Jorinde Voigt was born in Frankfurt am Main and lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany (2017); Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2016); Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2015); MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2014); Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2013); Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada (2012); Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany (2011); Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands (2010). Major group shows include Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2017); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2016); Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2013); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2012); 54th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2008). Voigt’s work is represented in major collections including: Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Art Institute of Chicago, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany; and Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany. In 2012, she received the Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Drawing Prize and in 2014 she appointed what Professor for Conceptual Drawing and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, Germany.
About Beatrice Dillon
London’s Beatrice Dillon is a producer, composer and NTS DJ with acclaimed releases and remixes across The Trilogy Tapes, PAN, Boomkat Editions and Where To Now?. Recent solo performances include Documenta 14 Athens, Cairo’s Masåfåt Festival, Moscow’s Save Festival, Borealis Norway and Barbican Centre, London. She has collaborated internationally with visual artists producing sound and music for film, installation and performance at ICA, Tate, Southbank Centre, Lisson Gallery, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Nasher Sculpture Centre Dallas and Mona Tasmania. Dillon was the recipient of Wysing Arts Centre’s artist residency in 2016 and is a resident on NTS Radio. Her collaborative EP with Gunnar Wendel (Kassem Mosse), Pulse High, was released on The Trilogy Tapes earlier this year.
