Since the early Renaissance a painterly exaggeration of reality has existed in the image in order to demon- strate wealth, splendor, and relevance on the one hand, and to enable the viewers a new immediacy in the access of what is shown by means of realism on the other. One of the most famous examples of this is the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck. Given her marked preference for reflective surfaces, games with light, and reflections, which have appeared in her complex layers of space and time since the early 2000s, Karin Kneffel draws to some extent from this tradition and transforms the canvas into a type of mirror of the world, but one that changes and distorts it, and only appears to reproduce it. With her characteristic and incom- parable mixture of reality and surreality, she colorfully paints found images, mostly based on black and white photography, and resultantly alienates the familiar in a subtle way. In her work, Kneffel deals with nothing less than the fundamental questions of painting, which revolve around the perception and construc- tion of images and highlight complex connections to the history of art, architecture, and film. Read More
Works by the artist can be found in the following public collections and museums: Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden; Miettinen Collection, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main; Museu Berardo, Lisbon; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; FRAC Normandie, Rouen; Unicredit Art Collection; Mercedes Benz Art Collection, Stuttgart; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; etc.
