Since the 1990s, the fruit still lifes have been part of Karin Kneffel's repertoire and helped her to her artistic breakthrough. They are among the artist's most sought-after works on the international auction market. When she began her training with, among others, Gerhard Richter, the art academy in Düsseldorf was clearly male-dominated. At the academy, Kneffel was advised to keep a certain distance to the fruit still life and animal genres. Especially for painters, these motifs are considered too lovely, too decorative. Kneffel ignored this advice and saw this prejudice as a challenge. She took the fruit still life, a genre that seemed to have been exhausted, to a whole new level and restored its right to exist in contemporary art. Her typical style is characterized by a perfect illusion of reality. For her pictorial spaces, the artist chooses extreme sections, a varied play of close-up and long-distance views, and allows vexing reflections to determine her works. Kneffel depicts the fruit hanging from the tree, but then the dark gray background adds an alienating effect and breaks the exaggerated naturalness. She achieves this impression in her works through the highest precision. The canvas is primed and sanded several times so that the paint is soaked up the way the artist wants it. The motif is roughly sketched in pencil. Kneffel then works with very fine brushes, even on large-format pictures, and gradually applies the paint in several very thin layers. The limitation of the depiction to a small section of the image and the supernaturally large depiction of the motif lead to a subtle alienation of the subject, which is portrayed with impressive photorealistic precision. The panicles of the light grapes are a perfect motif to study the play of light and shadow, as well as of indirect light. The feel and materiality of the grapes give the artist the space to stage different light phenomena. The natural warm light from a light source lying outside the pictorial space indirectly illuminates the grapes and makes the fruit shine. Kneffel is even able to depict the resulting transparency of individual grapes and the inner core in a painterly way. These light studies are early evidence of Karin Kneffel's interest in atmospheric phenomena. Later, she depicted fogged up windows and drops of water, which she adds on another image level. [SM]