ART CITIES:Paris-Fabian Knecht

One of the most prominent figures of Berlin’s contemporary art scene, Fabian Knecht works with temporal and spatial installations, performances and actions. With his work, he pursues a consistent and uncompromising path, one which causes irritation, which marks an exceptional state in the current of everyday life, and which scratches at societal mindsets.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Christophe Gaillard Archive

Fabian Knecht’s solo exhibition “SEKTION” is on presentation at the Galerie Christophe Gaillard. Challenging what constitutes a gallery or museum space, the “ISOLATION” series features photographs of conventional exhibition rooms (white cubes), which Knecht installed at various different locations in nature: a riverbed and a base of a vanished monument in Ukraine, a frozen sea in Vladivostok, wasteland in Berlin and an uprooted tree in a forest near Arnsberg. In this series, nature in all its complexity is elevated to the status of an artwork and exhibited in situ. For “ZERSETZUNG” Fabian Knecht broke into the castle Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, where Picasso lived and worked in the last years of his life. In the center of the park there is the tomb of Picasso. The sculpture “La Femme au Vase”, which was exhibited together with “Guernica” for the 1937 World’s Fair, marks the final resting place. In the course of the break-in Knecht stole a piece of grass from the surface of the tomb, where Picasso buried.  With a twist on the title of the famous documentary directed by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet “Les statues meurent aussi”, Knecht seems to salute – or thumb his nose at – the long gone artist, one final time, whose immaterial mythology lives on forever. A similar way of thinking can be found in the “RESTAURATION” series which also strives to re-inject play in the monumental. This time, the icons in question bear the name of Rembrandt, Dürer, Cranach and Rubens. Starting with photographs of a news story, the destruction by acid of around 50 masterpieces by Hans-Joachim Bohlmann in the 70’s and 80’s. Fabian Knecht develops a technique allowing him to reproduce these canvases in painting. Each photograph is decomposed into a precise number of squares, which then is reproduced in various shades of grey in acrylic on wood. By framing the final result behind a blurred glass panel, indistinctness is pushed to its extreme; the subject will only appear provided that we move through space in order to assess the appropriate distance. The stainless-steel dissecting table taking center stage spells it out: if the artist indeed undertakes a critical re-reading of various doctrinal issues in art history, its myths, its apparatus, its institutions, it nevertheless has nothing to do with overturning the system. On the contrary, by a series of operations involving dissolution, dissection or displacement, the authority figures only become more ambiguous, more contextual.

Info: Galerie Christophe Gaillard, 5 Rue Chapon, Paris, Duration: 1/12/17-31/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-12:20 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 12:00-19:00, http://galeriegaillard.com