Counted Hours

Crone is pleased to present our first exhibition of the new year. Under the title Counted Hours we present in our Berlin gallery a dialogue between works by the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven and the Austrian photo and video artist Julia Gaisbacher. As part of the festival Foto Wien 2025, we unveiled the first part of the exhibition in our Vienna spaces; now the second part comes to Berlin in a revised and expanded form. Using purely visual means, a very personal, intimate relationship is established between two artists who never met: Julia Gaisbacher spent several weeks in Darboven’s former studio and home, a space that has remained unchanged since the artist’s death in 2009. Her sensitive black-and-white photographs taken there are juxtaposed with large-format works by Darboven, in which she herself explored the medium of photography. Hanne Darboven (born in Munich in 1941, died in Hamburg in 2009) was one of the most significant representatives of conceptual art. She devoted much of her work to the visualization of time. Beginning in the 1960s, she developed a system of numbers and codes through which she reordered and “described” hours, days, weeks, months, years, and entire epochs. Julia Gaisbacher (born in 1983 in Graz) bases her practice on extensive research and long-term observation. Her aim is to photographically trace and reveal the relationships between architecture and society. Her works resist linear or classical narrative structures; instead, they strive to make the stories behind the stories perceptible. In Gezählte Stunden (Counted Hours), Gaisbacher sets out in search of what she calls the “present absentee”—and encounters the complex intensity that defines Darboven’s world.