Jorinde Voigt at Marc Selwyn Fine Arts

June 8–August 2, 2025

Drawings by Jorinde Voigt have a strange tendency to become less legible the longer you spend with them, their vibrant forms dividing into intricate diagrams that belie the ephemerality of their subject matter. Her works, some of which span over six feet in length, are full of bristling arrows and radiant sine waves rendered at an outsized scale, overlaid with gestural splashes of vibrant color and limned in gold and silver. Circling the galleries of Jorinde Voigt: Works on Paper at Marc Selwyn Fine Arts, you moved through a visual syllabus of Voigt’s extensive studies in 18 works—the subjects of which ranged from astronomical (as in Epicurus’s theory of an eternal universe, its elliptical orbital paths rendered in minute graphite markings) to romance (as in a series of radiant, rosy works inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s writings on the history of love). Many readings of Voigt’s work have characterized it as an attempt to translate its varied subjects to a visual medium, adopting a form that might approximate the experience of love (or music, or the night sky) firsthand.¹ But Voigt seems most pre-occupied by the question of how to represent those embodied feelings behind her subject matter (which often resists articulation), her array of academic citations often at odds with the overwhelming affective power of her work. Voigt’s abstractions excavate this tension, illustrating the irony of our attempts to catalogue and create order from our formless encounters with sublime subject matter.

Jorinde Voigt, Disappearance Beobachtungen im Jetzt (2015). Ink, India ink, oil pastel, pastel, and graphite on paper, framed, 86.75 × 55.25 inches; 90.75 × 59.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, and David Nolan Gallery.

In Disappearance Beobachtungen im Jetzt (2015), Voigt’s diagrammatic sketches give way to more dimensional forms. Imagined as an illustration when Voigt was engaging with Carl Jung’s work on human development, amorphous subjects dot the composition resembling shimmering, interlocked organs, pierced with pale cilia and dripping with dried ink. A rosy cloud billows above a magenta-spattered anchor, whose protrusions extend across the canvas, one limb spiraling into fleshy, puckered orifices while the other sublimates into a series of ascending concentric circles. There’s a joyful exuberance and intimacy to her vibrant, distorted forms, which shimmer with glossy dimensionality against their vacant white backdrop, but the effect is tempered by an often overwhelming suffusion of detail: The longer one looks at the work, the more markings emerge, faint lines of graphite that undergird the luminescent forms. Tracing the contours of Voigt’s hypersaturated abstractions, they appear like marginalia: a series of static, monochrome labels that attempt to taxonomize their impossible forms.

This tension between the initial dramatic illumination of Voigt’s fantastic subjects and the slow burn of its spectral notations reflects the irony of an attempt to academize romance. What does it mean to pin down love (or even lust) as a subject of study, to dissect and diagram something both embodied and ephemeral? Voigt’s loose insertions of ink, which spill across the boundaries of her fine linework, re-insert the sensorial world of color and gesture into her rendition of Luhmann’s treatise, staking out space for the aspects of romance that resist articulation, remaining suspended somewhere in the blurred outlines of her hovering forms. In this way, her works wed the intimate to the universal in a kind of dream logic, translating their subject matter through the affective responses it invokes in the bodies of her viewing subjects.

On the opposite wall of the gallery, Voigt’s works turn to more utilitarian modes of mark-making, appropriating the iconography of musical scores to test the limits of their signification and imagine alternate modalities. In Ludwig van Beethoven/Sonate Nr. 6 (Opus 10 Nr. 2), #3 (2012), an abstracted transcription of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, musical staffs appear splayed out across the page in a swirl of threads that even Voigt, a classically trained musician, might struggle to decode. But legibility is beside the point for this series. Her swaths of color evolve as they move across the page, their saturated pigment softening into faded tones variegated with visible brush strokes, and dissolving into staccato-dripping segments evoking the rapid stroke of the artist’s free movement across the page.

These works read like a kind of gestural record, evidence of the artist’s hand in motion, which might also mirror the passage of a pianist’s fingers across the keys. Sound, Voigt reminds us, is movement in the most literal sense: The vibrations of a string struck with a hammer resonate across a room and into the listener’s body. The static score is the aberration, the single still point between the activity of creation and the profound capacity for sound to animate physical and emotional responses. With its dynamic expression, Voigt’s work unites our intellectual and innate understandings of music as an animating force, a product and a source of motion played out across time. In doing so, she captures something elided in the static bars of the classical score, a kind of embodied knowledge that transcends the formalized signifiers which codify it.

It is this attention to what falls through the cracks of language and notation that seems to occupy Voigt. In her hands, language is cast like a net across its subjects, a skein that may conform to the shape of its contents even if it fails to capture their totality. And yet for all her attention to the fallibilities of signifiers, Voigt remains optimistic about our capacity to connect across the gulf of individual experience, to harness a creative impulse to convey the interior sensory world of one’s own body. For all her commitment to critical and philosophical inquiry, her work seems instead to suggest that these modes of thought carry us back to our most basic modes of being, building up layers of symbolism around the truths that our bodies knew all along. Rather than attempting to create a language that speaks to a universal subject, she holds fast to the specifics of sensorial experience, allowing a viewer a glimpse of the subject matter that remains just out of reach.