Hanne Darboven was born on April 29, 1941, in Munich. Darboven studied under Wilhelm Grimm and Almir Mavignier at the Academy of the Arts in Hamburg from 1962 until 1966.The next two years were spent in New York, where she was influenced primarily by her contact with minimalist artists such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. Since that time, she has been engaged in the attempt to visualize time in her art using her own system of characters and symbols. Through number codes, texts, photographs, and diagrams, Darboven tries to cement and control the passage of time or historical events with simple typing paper, making the time dimension of her works perceptible as a spatial dilation by hanging these pages on the wall. Her intention is to make the rather imperceptible flow of time comprehensible and to show the limits of perception. Her works were exhibited in New York in the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and in the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. Darboven took part in documenta in Kassel four times, participating in 1972, 1977, 1982, and 2002. Also in 1982, she represented Germany at the Biennale di Venezia. Darboven received the respected Lichtwark Prize in Hamburg in 1994.