Opening on Thursday, January 26, 2023, 6–9pm

Imi Knoebel’s photographic works from the early 1970s are the focus of the current exhibition “Imi Knoebel. Projektionen” at Jahn und Jahn in Munich. A selection of drawings from between 1973 and 1975—executed in graphite and red Indian ink on paper—is also on view. The presentation is rounded out by works drawn with lacquer on acrylic glass and on foils in larger formats from the early 1990s.

“Between 1968 and 1974—before he discovered color and its spatial dimensions for himself—Knoebel spatialized white light shapes and captured them in the medium of black-and-white photography.” [1]

“The ‘projections’ were terrain for Knoebel’s experiments with ‘disembodiment’ or ‘disobjectification’. He wanted to drive this principle, which he saw in the ideas of the Russian Suprematists—especially Kazimir S. Malewitsch—to the extreme and, for example make forms visible as pure light figures, with the physical background acting solely as an arbitrary, exchangeable, ever-changing, and even vanishing reflector. […] With the paradoxical act of fixing these ephemeral entities as an unchanging photographic image—in multiple variations according to photography’s own transient nature—Knoebel moved photography beyond any objectivity and into a new and artistically autonomous position which many people have not yet recognized in this pure form.” [2]

[1] Hubertus Butin, Complexity as a mode of production. Knoebel’s works on paper, in: Imi Knoebel, exh. cat. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin 2009, Ostfildern 2009, pp. 69–83, see p. 80.

[2] Johannes Stüttgen, Knoebel’s early photographic works, in: Imi Knoebel, exh. cat. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin 2009, Ostfildern 2009, pp. 47–50, see p. 48f.

Selected bibliography:

W Knoebel. Projektion 4/1–11, 5/1–11, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1972.

Johannes Stüttgen im Gespräch mit Imi Knoebel, in: Imi Knoebel, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1982, pp. 90–98.

Sabine Kimpel-Fehlemann, Das retouchierte Licht, in: Imi Knoebel, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach 1984.

Imi Knoebel. Weiss Schwarz, with texts by Raimund Stecker and Penelope Curtis, Galerie Thaddäus Ropac, Salzburg 2010.