Hanne Darboven

Hanne Darboven (29 April 1941 – 9 March 2009) was a German conceptual artist, best known for her large-scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.

Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich. She grew up in Rönneburg, a southern suburb of Hamburg, as the second of three daughters of Cäsar Darboven and Kirsten Darboven. Her father was a successful and well-to-do businessman in Hamburg; the family brand Darboven coffee is well known in Germany.

Following a brief period in which she studied as a pianist, Darboven studied art with Willem Grimm, Theo Garve and Almir Mavignier at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1962 to 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she lived in New York City, at first in total isolation from the New York art scene. She then moved back to her family home in Hamburg and continued to live and work there among an extraordinary collection of disparate cultural artefacts until her death in 2009.

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