Sale: 541 / Contemporary Art Day Sale, June 09. 2023 in Munich Lot 174

 

174
Karin Kneffel
Ohne Titel, 2016.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 50,000 / $ 54,000
Sold:
€ 152,400 / $ 164,592

(incl. surcharge)
Ohne Titel. 2016.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated, as well as inscribed with the work number "2016/36" on the reverse. 100 x 100 cm (39.3 x 39.3 in).

• In the small series of the Candle Pictures, the artist examines Gerhard Richter's famous complex from 1982/83, which Kneffel regards as an "icon of painting".
• This is the first time that a painting from this series is offered on the international auction market (source: artprice.com).
• With her complex and inventive paintings and the illusion of sharpness and blur, Kneffel has attained a playful take on Realism.
• Over the past years her works were part of comprehensive solo shows, among other at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden and the Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See.
• In 2024 the artist has a solo show at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf
.

Mentioned on the artist's official homepage.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich.
Private collection Southern Germany (acquired from the above).

"When you look through a fogged up window, you either look at the pane and see the raindrops or you look through the pane, which you then don't really perceive. Instead you see the space behind it. I paint both perspectives, so that the incidental and the intended perception happen on the same level. If you observe my painting, you see drops and background at the same time. For a while both linger on the same level, before observers decide to focus on the background, while the raindrops still remain sharp in the foreground."
Karin Kneffel in an interview with Christiane Hoffmans, author and cultural editor for Welt am Sonntag and BLAU , Gläserne Optik, text released on occasion of the series of art talks: Kunstsache. Künstlergespräche im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, September 20, 2017, Über den Umgang mit Menschen, wenn Zuneigung im Spiel ist. Sammlung Klein, http://www.kneffel.de/kneffel/texte/christiane_hoffmans_deu.html).

For the exhibition "Die Kerze" at the Museum Frieder Burda (2016), in which, among others, works by Marina Abramovic, Thomas Demand, Jörg Immendorff, Alicja Kwade and Georg Baselitz were also shown, Karin Kneffel examined the famous series of candle paintings by Gerhard Richter, her former professor (1982/83, among others at The Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden). Between 1981 and 1987, Kneffel studied painting at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf, eventually as a master student of Gerhard Richter. Today Kneffel is professor for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Expanded and renewed in her paintings, she now rethinks Richter's iconic candle still lifes in an inventive and very individual way. She lets the candle protrude into the picture from the side or, as in the work offered here, from above with the flame licking up; in other works, the flame has already gone out and there’s just a little smoke left. Gerhard Richter's "Betty" (1988, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis) can also be found in some paintings by Kneffel from the same year, in which she shows the work in its museum context with some museum visitors and through the illusion of a wet pane of glass separated from the observer. "Images result from other images," explains the artist (quoted from: www.gagosian.com).
Kneffel first explored the motif or this illusion of a window pane sprinkled with raindrops or fogged up a few years earlier as a demarcation between the level of the image and the viewer, in order to place certain aspects of the representation in a state between sharpness and blurriness.

In the work offered here, the artist also uses such sophisticated painterly means to create the impression of blurring, distortion and plays with the perception of painting and the border between reality and illusion. Again, the pictorial composition is divided into several complex levels. In the present work there seems to be a pane of glass covered with raindrops and streaks between the candle and a room suggested by walls and floor, which blocks, changes, obscures and mystifies the view of the spatial scene behind it. [CH]



174
Karin Kneffel
Ohne Titel, 2016.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 50,000 / $ 54,000
Sold:
€ 152,400 / $ 164,592

(incl. surcharge)