Imi Knoebel

Klaus Wolf “Imi” Knoebel is a sculptor and painter known for his colorful but pensive abstract constructions of acrylic painted aluminum or Masonite strips and planes. Knoebel’s work plays with the relations of visibility and concealment, using materials to cover or reveal as a conventional painter would use layers of brushstrokes. For example, in paintings such as 1940 Odyshape C 7 (1995), Knoebel pays homage to Piet Mondrian and the Bauhaus, with the use of white, red, yellow, and blue. Colored strips are composed into an excited lattice that has been obscured by a white square placed over top, effectively erasing the underlying layers. But as they jut out at the edges, their form and vibrancy give the viewer an invitation to mentally complete the picture.

Knoebel studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where his professors and fellow students included many of the luminaries of post-War German art. His early works used projected light in architecture to examine form, color, and space. Part of his work, encouraged by his influential instructor Joseph Beuys, involves the social experience of space and form with site-specific sculptural works.

Knoebel's work has been exhibited widely since the 1960s, including multiple appearances at Documenta exhbiitions between 1972 and 1987, a 1983 retrospective at Kunstmuseum Bonn, and shows at the Stedelijk Museum and the Guggenheim among others. He was commissioned in 2008 to produce windows for the Reims Cathedral in France and was the recipient of the 2011 Kythera Prize. His work is held in several important public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Dia:Beacon, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, among many others.