Imi Knoebel

Critical text

Imi Knoebel (b. 1940, Dessau) brought a radical vision to German abstract painting. Coming of age as theorists spoke of the “death of painting”, Knoebel studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys who acquainted him with the works of contemporary figures including Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, and Lucio Fontana. The artist took from this discursive environment a willingness to push painting to a different limit, to deconstruct the distinction between the work and the space in which it is seen with a deftness and lucidity that has defined his practice over decades. Knoebel’s painterly idiom, which combines elements of the syntax of Minimalism and the aesthetics of Constructivism, examines the dynamics of shape, colour, surface, and structure, as well as probing the unstable interstitial space between painting and sculptural object. Historical painterly concerns like that of figure and ground also feature in Knoebel’s work, querying where a painting begins and ends in relation to where it is sited and where it is seen. He is also known for developing certain imagistic themes over a period of time, working through bodies of work in cycles and then moving to new ones. Knoebel’s relentless determination to innovate within abstraction is one of the qualities that has made his work so enduring.

Text by Anna Gritz