Imi Knoebel

What makes a picture a picture? Is it the colour, the form, the format, the composition? Imi Knoebel, a student of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, began questioning the rules of traditional painting early on. He worked with light projections and experimented with an expanded concept of the image that included the entire space. The focus was on the relationship between space, support and colour.

Initially, Knoebel's colours were black and white, his material was fibreboard, his theme the relationship between black, white and line. After these purist line pictures, the light projections and the work phase of the "white pictures", the step into colour followed in 1974. In image sequences and series, Knoebel analytically tests the structuring and division of coloured surfaces – as in the group of works shown here. His artistic interest is in the declination of possible formal and colourful pictorial constellations within a defined vocabulary of colour and form.

Knoebel's works are represented at the following museums and institutions, among others: Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; K21, Düsseldorf; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt a. M.; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; Albertina, Vienna; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MoMA, New York; and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Aichi.

Imi Knoebel (born 1940 in Dessau) lives and works in Düsseldorf.