Jorinde Voigt’s solo exhibition “Hills and Turns” presents a selection of new works on paper whose common element is the hill shape. The works 45 Hills and 40 Hills (Vertical Turn), the eight-part series Yellow Hills, and the ten-part series The Scope (all 2017) are on display in a colorful architecture custom built for the show.

Voigt’s hills are a reference to an archetypical way to represent an event. The suspense curve, originally a diagram, traces the dramaturgical arc of an action. This inserts a temporal dimension into the picture, making it legible from left to right. In the various works and series, individual events generated by a structure of repetition and variation form entire event landscapes rendered as hill sceneries (The Scope). In the overarching compositional ensemble, the hill thus emerges as both the prominent element and what obscures other elements. It marks an event of perception and by the same token the perception of an event. The arrangement of these hills is mirrored in the upper part of each sheet—it is reflectively transformed into its opposite. The individual color ranges of the works and series lend them an atmospheric “tinge.” Blue, for example, has a calming effect and can be associated with water and night, whereas red and yellow stimulate the eye.

Other visual elements that appear throughout include cloud-shaped inlays that gather around the hilltops and successively dissipate, as in Chinese landscape paintings (Yellow Hills), as well as a multiplicity of rotating and vertical dashes that establish a connection between above and below while also being a performative expression of the simultaneity of different stances in composition.

Colors as well as forms are subject to the artist’s spontaneous decisions. In that sense, the landscapes may be read as “cartographies of the moment,” as Voigt has put it.

The exhibition architecture’s monochrome walls painted in dark blue and a pinkish yellow echo the color ranges of the notations. Set off from the gallery wall, they also provide a sheltered space for the works that extends the atmospheres immanent to them into the third dimension

Jorinde Voigt was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1977. She graduated from Katharina Sieverding’s master class at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2004 and lives and works in Berlin.

Her most recent solo exhibitions were presented by Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg (2017), Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2016), Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2015), the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2014), and the Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2013). She has contributed to several biennials including, most prominently, the Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016), and now the Biennale de Lyon. There as well as at Finland-Institute Berlin are works from the serie Hills currently on view.

Work by Jorinde Voigt is included in numerous collections, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, and the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.