Jorinde Voigt: Pieces for Words and Views - Tapa dura

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.--The New Yorker

The unique visual language Jorinde Voigt (*1977 in Frankfurt am Main) develops in her drawings aims at making the invisible visible. Music, weather, geography, literature, and philosophy are among the subjects that serve as sources of inspiration for Voigt’s lyrical drawings, all of which she renders into a dizzying maelstrom of lines and notations as one thought is linked to the next. In Piece for Words and Views, Voigt turns to Roland Barthes’s famous book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments to produce a series of thirty-six drawings, each of which contains elements of collage cut to represent particular words found in the book―thereby recreating the central tenets of semiotics: signifier and signified. With texts by John Yau and the artist, this publication presents Jorinde Voigt’s complex pictorial spaces, which come together in a composition of form and idea.