Critics' Pick
By Anne Prentnieks
In his monumental book, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, the social theorist Niklas Luhmann explored the cultural fusion of intimacy and matrimony, analyzing economic and political influences on love’s changing role in society. Jorinde Voigt’s airy, diagrammatic drawings are a reflection on Luhmann’s writing: Playful and associative, they are a poststructuralist response to his structuralist text, interpretatively assigning a set of visualized systems to codify Voigt’s own experience studying Luhmann’s book. In doing so, Voigt's works seem to reference an ebullient jumble of science metaphors: Using iotas of text—specific phrases and graphemes that resonate with her on an intuitive level—she builds pictorial information chains, which she in turn compounds into matrices. The result is a series of vast, graceful images that embody nuanced conversations between the components.
Voigt is known for her lyrical sensibility as well as her calibrated approach to creating artwork. She is a classically trained musician from a family of scientists. If in past series, her imagery has specifically conjured graph-like linear systems—based on such exact references as musical scores, sound waves, linguistic structures, and mathematical algorithms—then these new drawings, inspired by Luhmann’s nonlinear writing, evoke a more biological take, as they track the evolution from one literary moment to the next. Voigt collages metallic leaf in varying tones alongside swaths of marigold, coral, and azure to create unusual floating forms with an illustrative impishness; the resulting pictures resemble space-age landscapes occupied by mercurial creatures. Her works are innately didactic: She carefully structures the bulbous shapes, framing each with a draftsman’s delicate, curved lines and handwritten text annotations. Ultimately, her drawings function as cognitive maps, as meaning multiplies from passages of text and grows into webs of association. As Voigt regards Luhmann’s discourse on societal structures enabling love, her drawings delineate her own way of reconciling information through whimsical interpretation, shaping an elegant visual reality from the tangles of language.
Goings on About Town: Art
The swooping lines in this Berlin-based artist's intricate, large-scale drawings seem at first to have some scientific significance. On closer inspection, however, the drawings resolve into a hermetic, highly personal disquisition on the history of love in Western Europe, with annotations borrowed from the writings of the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Peculiar, sometimes breathtaking forms, from a gold-and-red double helix to floating clouds and virus-like spiky balls, are ringed by obsessive glosses on what Voigt, following Luhmann, calls the "codification of intimacy." You won't make out every detail, but her superb drawings are far more than the sum of their sometimes inscrutable parts. Through June 21. (Nolan, 527 W. 29th St. 212-925-6190)
The Next Most Collectible Artists
The influence of music and science on German artist Voigt- a trained cellist who hails from a family of scientists- is palpable. Her collages and drawings, marked by sweeping, lyrical strokes, take inspiration from sources such as Roland Barthe's 'A Lover's Discourse: Fragments' and Beethoven's 32 sonatas. Dealer David Nolan reluctantly admits fairs have played a major role in the international recognition the artist has recently received, including the much talked-about section at his booth at the last ADAA Art Show. Voigt's collector base expanded from Europe to North America and Asia, with shows at Christian Lethert, in Cologne, Regina Gallery in London, and Galerie Kluser, in Munich. Prices range from $8,000 to $75,000. The Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou both bought drawings from Nolan before Voigt's first exhibition at the New York gallery last year. An exhibition in Toronto followed, and she is in talks with several U.S. museums about solo shows.