Hanne Darboven’s installation Fuchs du hast die Gans gestohlen (Fox, You Stole the Goose) (1990) comprises 190 panels, each featuring a collage of postcards and photographs that document the year 1990 through her characteristic “calendar calculations.” It exemplifies Darboven’s systematic approach to imposing self-generated order on temporal chaos.

The work takes its title from a well-known German children’s song in which a fox steals a goose and faces the threat of the hunter’s gun. Ernst Anschütz (1780–1861) published this text in 1824 under the title “Warnung” (Warning) with a melody derived from an earlier folk tune. Darboven inscribes the song’s opening four lines on the initial panel, which she labels “index.” Yet the collaged sheets throughout the installation feature a taxidermied fox—the song’s antagonist rendered harmless by its transformation into an object.

A.R. Penck’s works from around 1974, especially his Untitled paintings, appear as the visible trace of a radical break with himself. Penck described this moment, saying he felt, in his own words, “dass die Figur oder der Geist von Penck tot ist” (that the figure or spirit of Penck is dead)¹. These paintings present a dense web of gestural lines—a kind of visual “graues Rauschen” (gray noise)². Here, the familiar order of his Systembilder dissolves, and signs disintegrate into pure energy. Apparent clarity fractures, and out of the chaos, a central, disordered inner life reveals itself.

In Underground Bebop (1994), Penck re-engages with structure, albeit in a markedly different form. The turbulent noise of the past gives way to a rhythmic system of graphic signs: arrows, stick figures and circles. They follow no narrative but rather resemble a musical score: open, vibrating, interrelated. The signs become a cosmos of their own, in which order arises from repetition, contrast and tension.

In Standart 9 feeling (1996), Penck intensifies this investigation. The composition is denser and more complex, its signs embedded in distinctly demarcated yet interconnected fields. It evokes a map of inner states akin to a control room of consciousness. The “feeling” highlighted by the title arises from the interplay of the signs themselves—from their encounter, their repetition and their rhythmic resonance.

The juxtaposition of these works makes Penck’s artistic trajectory visible:

1974 – Dissolution: the old disintegrates, and a ground zero is created.

1994 – Construction: from the fragments emerges a new, rhythmic order.

1996 – Concentration and Permeation: the system expands, becomes denser and is suffused with sensation.

Penck set aside the “spirit of Penck” of 1974, reinventing himself as the architect of a universal, systematic pictorial vocabulary. His path from the chaos of “gray noise,” through the rhythmic qualities of “bebop,” to the structural aspects of “feeling” reflects the possibilities and limits of communication and the emotion that resonates even within abstract structures.