
Hanne Darboven
For decades, the German Conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) lived with her mother in Hamburg’s Harburg district. It was there that she made Fin de siècle—Buch der Bilder (End of the Century—Book of Pictures), 1992–93, a sprawling piece that lent its title to a recent exhibition of the artist’s work at Petzel. The installation was inspired, in part, by a 1923 edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s volume of poems Das Buch der Bilder (1902), which is his least recognized text, perhaps owing to its ostensibly scattered selection of short lyrics, dialogues, and interior monologues. One wonders