Over several decades, Hanne Darboven, who encountered the emerging Conceptual Art movement during a two-year stay in New York in the nineteen-sixties, has created a highly idiosyncratic body of work in which she engages with time passing and its notation. In her often extensive installations, countless framed sheets of paper take center-stage, inscribed, day in and day out, by Darboven with almost monastic discipline using waveforms, strokes or digit-sum calculations based on the numbers of each date depicted. Sometimes Darboven copied entire books or traced the course of certain epochs. Time passing, along with personal or historical time, becomes tangible through this spatial rendering.

This untitled work from 1972 consists of little more than ten sheets, all in the same format, each set individually within a metal frame. All the sheets are inscribed with wavy lines along pre-drawn horizontal guidelines. Contrary to the initial impression, however, this is not some form of written character that conveys content, but instead the purest possible expression of a clearly defined activity. In this respect, the content is the time that went into writing on these pages, embodied in visibly individual handwriting that is however limited to pure execution.