IMI KNOEBEL

Imi Knoebel is one of the few representatives of a radical, non-representational style of painting in Germany. Inspired by like-minded fellow-campaigners at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, such as Blinky Palermo and Imi Giese, as well as his legendary teacher Joseph Beuys, in the 1960s, inspired by Malevich, he developed a pictorial language reduced to rectangular basic forms with black and white. All other forms and colours were contained within the form and colour of this fundamental element. By means of splintering, dividing, multiplying and varying, all further elements could be extracted and formed. With Knoebel, the painted picture became a three-dimensional object, the wall became the pictorial ground. Through the use of simple industrial materials and the introduction of collage techniques, Knoebel reinforced the object nature of his works.

“In the border region between painting and sculpture, with precise methodology, Knoebel developed an artistic line of inquiry which revolves around the question: What is a picture?“
Starting from the basic elements of painting, of colour and form, Imi Knoebel developed his answer to the question. With a mixture of intuition and calculation, these two elements are placed in relation to each other in countless variations. Thus, the principle of the series is of great significance. It is precisely in a series that the freedom exists to open new doors, and to fathom the essence of painting.

Thus, in “O.T.V. Ed” Knoebel places eight light yellow rectangles of equal size in two rows of 4, above and next to one another, accentuated by a fine gap of luminous tones. The monochrome colour surfaces appear to ignite against the precise colour strips in between. The interaction of the colour fields with the strips increases their intensity. Based on “Grosse Strasse Weiss” from 2000, in the work offered here, the artist, by using a collaged plastic foil, creates a state of detachment from the two-dimensional surface, and succeeds by very subtle means in creating a leap into space. The compositional element of the pictorial structure in this work, which is made up of several layers, clearly stands out and places the focus on the colour, the colour surface and space as the centre point of his purist, artistic way of working.