Jorinde Voigt: Works on Paper
Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Jorinde Voigt: Works on Paper, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, on view June 8 - August 2, 2025. This show will feature 18 immersive works on paper that translate complex and intangible concepts —from music to philosophy— into lyrical abstractions overlaid with a network of fine lines and meticulous notations. Known for her bold strokes of colors and shimmering gold and silver leaf accents, Voigt creates a synaesthetic world that simultaneously feels personal and universal.
Jorinde Voigt (b. 1977) is a leading conceptual artist based in Berlin. Working principally within the medium of drawing, her works have been likened to musical scores, scientific diagrams, or thought models. Voigt develops conceptually rigorous systems of mark-making to visualize immaterial phenomena in color and form. Music, weather, geometry, literature, and philosophy are among the subjects that inspire Voigt’s drawings, all of which she renders into a dizzying maelstrom of lines and notations.
Included in this exhibition are examples from a body of work dedicated to Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. In this series, Voigt, who trained as a classical cellist in her youth, does not strive to illustrate or interpret the music; rather, she is concerned with researching perception and “developing a way of writing that extracts the emotional spectrum inscribed in Beethoven’s scores”—in other words, to transcribe the ethereal. In Voigt’s Symphonic Areas series elements of musical theory and sound frequency appear in curvilinear, wave-like diagrams.
Voigt has also applied her unique visual method to the deconstruction of texts. In Disappearance Beobachtungen im Jetzt, 2015, part of the Observations in the Nowseries, the artist was intensely engaged with the writings of C. G. Jung, and in particular, his studies in human development and the concept of the unconscious. Using Jung’s psychological theories as a conceptual framework, Voigt approached her drawings as thought diagrams, choosing certain colors – pinks, reds and greens – for their association with different emotional states.
In her large shimmering Epicurus Letter to Pythocles II, 2013, Voigt summarizes the philosopher’s ideas on astronomical and celestial matters to illustrate his method of thinking about truth. Two works in the exhibition, Inclusion of Sexuality (Niklas Luhmann/Love as Passion/Inclusion of Sexuality) XXXVI, 2014 and Circus (Effect of Transformation)/Niklas Luhmann/Love as Passion/The Rhetoric of Excess and the Experience of Instability XX, 2013-14, reflect on German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s book, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, 1982, which analyzes the evolution of love in Western Europe from the seventeenth century to the present. Key words and passages that trigger intuitive associations transform essential concepts into visual images. With scientific precision, Voigt augments her drawings with handwritten annotations referencing particular chapters or passages. Across the sheet, freehand ink lines connect key elements, constructing a matrix that defines Voigt’s spatial and temporal parameters.
Incommunicability III, 2014, illustrates the moment of contact between body and space. The arabesque shapes embellished with silver and copper leaf are derived from the impressions of the artist’s body on the paper surface.
In Potential 2, 2020, and Potential V, 2020, Voigt hand dyes paper with hues that corresponded to specific stimuli or emotions—a midnight blue that has may allude to marine or cosmological phenomena —then adds her meticulous notations, gold leaf, and gestural markings to convey a dream state, at once familiar and otherworldly. In Trust and Rain in June I, 2020-21, Voigt uses gold leaf, pastel, oil chalk, and India ink to examine weather systems, creating imagery at once microscopic, marine, and saturated. Her complex techniques mirror the artist’s multifaceted thinking: successive layers of ink, pastel, colored pencil, and intricately inlaid precious metal leaf.
The three Immersion drawings, 2023, on display explore how we perceive rather than exactly what we perceive. The artist imagines tubular forms that could illustrate the unconscious. The torus shape has appeared in other series by the artist, who is fascinated by the shape’s proximity to the thought models of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan not only concerned himself with knot theory from mathematical topology but also used it to portray psychoanalytical concepts such as ‘Desire’ or ‘the Imaginary.’
The winner of important grants and prizes such as the prestigious Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Drawing Prize in 2012, Voigt has participated in biennials worldwide, most notably the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2011), Venice, Italy; Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2017); Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2017); and Vienna Biennial for Change, Vienna, Austria (2019).
Voigt has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Horst-Janssen-Museum, Oldenburg, Germany; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria; Kunsthalle Krems, Austria; MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy; Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; and Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, among others.
Voigt's work is featured in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The British Museum, London; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; 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; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; and Hessische Landesmuseum Darmstadt, among others.