ART CITIES:Paris-Imi Knoebel

One of the leading German artists of the post-war period, Imi Knoebel’s wide-ranging and rigorous oeuvre incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, projections and installation. Born as Klaus Wolf Knoebel in Dessau in 1940 he studied under the tutelage of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and was assigned, together with his friend Imi Giese, its legendary “Raum 19”* (1968) now part of Dia Beacon’s permanent Collection.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

Imi Knoebel in his solo exhibition “was machen Sie den” presents an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper in which the artist further explores the fundamentals of painting and sculpture. Revisiting the legacy of Minimal art and Colour Field painting, this new series is characterised by its focus on a unique figure and a more gestural approach to color, retaining traces of the brush in the densely textured surfaces. A group of large “Figura” paintings is on display alongside new “BIG GIRL” paintings and a significant series of large-scale drawings, in which Imi Knoebel experiments with both form and color. The works in the current exhibition all come from the artist’s most recent period. In the 36 drawings (“Figur Z.1” – Figur Z.36”) Knoebel sketches the preliminary field on which the subsequent paintings in this show are based. In the rectangular works on paper, Knoebel freely experiments with possible starting points for the painting series “BIG GIRLS” and “Figurae” (both acrylic on aluminum) to be realised. The “BIG GIRLS”, which are heavier and more compact, can appear as preparatory works for the more complex “Figurae”. Originating from an intuitively motivated, freehand drawing, the forms or contours of the painting on aluminium, on the other hand, are given as clear figuration. The pictorial ground sets firm limits to the painting on aluminium, to which Knoebel more or less deals in his brushstrokes, but against which he can also rebel by opposing it with small-scale densifications. Imi Knoebel was born as Klaus Wolf Knoebel in 1940 in Dessau. From 1962–64 he studied at the Darmstadt Werkkunstschule, in a course based on the ideas of the pre-Bauhaus course taught by famous artists Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy. Shortly after Knoebel started attending the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in a class run by a Joseph Beuys. Together with Blinky Palermo (with whom he shared a studio), Katharina Sieverding and several others, he grew as an artist and over the course of years has decisively established the notable career. Imi Knoebel first began making paintings in the 1960s with the strict and basic organising principle of thick or thin vertical lines drawn at variable distances from each other. Between 1966-73 he produced around 250,000 A4 pencil line drawings, and exhibited them in six high and narrow steel cupboards, hermetically sealed and accessible only on demand. He further dematerialised the medium of painting altogether by simply projecting lines, squares or crosses onto internal or external walls. This reductive approach to painting continued into a series of black and white abstract works that played with combinations of rectangular forms. Since the mid 1970s and especially following the death of his friend Blinky Palermo, Knoebel began to systematically experiment with color, the expansive painting series “24 Farben – für Blinky” (1977) marking the beginning of this process. During the 1980s, he incorporated found objects into his installations and constructions in works such as “Eigentum Himmelreich” (1983) which consists of 18 separate objects and is dedicated to his friend and fellow artist Imi Giese. Since the 1990s, Knoebel has used aluminium as a painting ground, cut-out and painted in single colours, such as in the series of primary coloured paintings titled “Ich Nicht” (2006), an homage to Barnett Newman’s key work “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue”. In recent works (2014-2015) Knoebel has combined organic and geometric shaped panels in combinations of two or three colors, occasionally adding in a phosphorescent effect that soaks, stores and emits the surrounding light.

*Raum 19 (1968), is a key work in Imi Knoebel’s oeuvre, prescient of his mature aesthetic and practice. Created while he was still a Meister-student under Joseph Beuys, it took its title from the place of its execution, the number of his studio in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. All 184 parts (stretchers, planar elements, stereometric and rectangular volumes) are fabricated from wood and fiberboard, which has been used “raw,” in an untreated state; the pristine condition of these simple geometric components gives the impression that they await future deployment.

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 23/11/19-18/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net