Though her works on paper often drew on rules and repetitions, and though she enjoyed a close friendship with Sol LeWitt during her years in New York, the German artist and composer Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) never quite fit the art academies’ intractable designation of “conceptual artist.” Her rambling, rhythmic installations of scribbles and calculations, accompanied by photographs and objects and often filling entire rooms, have as much human imperfection as mathematical accuracy — and can take on an epic grandeur as they accumulate historical and personal detail.
Five years after the Dia Art Foundation presented her magnum opus, “Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983,” New Yorkers can rediscover Darboven’s art at Petzel, which has filled the parlor floor of its uptown gallery with the installation “Europa 97,” made from 384 sheets of paper. On each day of 1997, Darboven headed a page with the date and the word “today.” Beneath, she repeated
