Imi Knoebel (b. 1940)

Bold and arresting, Imi Knoebel’s Untitled presents a deft interplay of colour and form across five joined panels, painted the year the artist was included in Documenta 8 in Kassel. In Untitled, a crimson rectangle is balanced against stark white wood. Although spare, the work is part shutter and part portal, and redolent with associations. Fascinated by the relationship between colour and its material support, Knoebel’s geometric abstraction builds on the legacies of Mondrian and Malevich, artists he first encountered while studying under Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. It was Malevich’s iconic Black Square, 1915, however, that gave Knoebel the freedom to ‘start at nothing’ and create a radical gesture (I. Knoebel quoted in K. Connolly, ‘Artist Imi Knoebel: 'If you want to stay alive, you have to do something radical', The Guardian, 15 July, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/15/artist-imi-knoebel-if-you-want-to-stay-alive-you-have-to-do-something-radical). While at the Kunstakademie, shared a studio with Blinky Palermo, whose Romantic conception of art inspired Knoebel’s embrace of colour. Filtered through this eclectic assortment of influences, he established a vibrant visual idiom distinctly his own, producing graphic abstractions that resonate with feeling. As Knoebel said when asked about his paintings, ‘I look at it and can only take in the beauty, and I don’t want to see it in relation to anything else. Only what I see, simply because it has its own validity’ (Imi Knoebel, quoted in J. Stüttgen, ‘“I wouldn’t Say Anything Voluntary Anyway!” Interview with Imi Knoebel’, Imi Knoebel: Works 1966- 2014, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, p. 24). In the endless red of Untitled, Knoebel’s zeal is abundantly apparent, and by constructing the work out of wood, he has produced a chromatic materiality and an overwhelming saturation of light.