Untitled

Stretching two metres in height, the present work belongs to a series of slashed paintings created by Imi Knoebel during the mid-1980s. Combining gestural layers of colour with incisions reminiscent of Lucio Fontana’s tagli, it takes its place within the artist’s wide-ranging inquiries into the relationship between colour, form, surface and support. Knoebel had first begun to incorporate colour into his work in 1977, following the death of his close friend and fellow artist Blinky Palermo. Following the bright, minimal shaped canvases initially created during this period, Knoebel went on to experiment with layered painterly brushwork, adopting a visceral, dynamic language that seemed to hark back to Abstract Expressionism. In the present work, the artist’s scratches and cuts counteract these chromatic rhapsodies, revealing the base materiality of his fibreboard support: he would continue these investigations in his Schlachtenbildern (Battle Pictures) of the early 1990s. Throughout his career, Knoebel delighted in referencing, undermining and reinterpreting the lessons of art history. ‘Yves Klein has painted his canvas blue, Lucio Fontana has cut slashes into his’, the artist explained. ‘What’s left? If you want to do something, to stay alive, you have to think of something at least as radical’ (I. Knoebel, quoted in interview with K. Connolly, The Guardian, 15 July 2015). Works from the same series are held in the Broad Foundation, Los Angeles and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.
Born Klaus Wolf Knoebel in 1940, the artist spent his early childhood in war-torn Dresden – witnessing the firebombing of the city at the age of five – before fleeing with his family to West Germany in 1950. At art school in Darmstadt, he became close friends with the artist Rainer Giese, and the two decided to change their first names to ‘Imi’: an acronym for ‘Ich mit Ihm’ (‘me and him’) and – in typically irreverent fashion – the name of a commercial washing detergent promising ‘uncompromising purity’. Their tongue-in-cheek attitude convinced Joseph Beuys to offer them a place in his class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where the pair spent a year creating an installation in the legendary ‘Raum 19’ (‘classroom 19’). The results – which included 19 layers of fibreboard covering the walls – sparked Knoebel’s interest in art’s material properties: over the years he would explore a variety of unusual media, including aluminium, wood and masonite, as supports for his paintings. Though he absorbed the teachings of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich – in particular their desire to create an autonomous existence for art – his work retained the strains of wit and subversion latent in his early practice. In the present work, the transcendental claims of abstraction and Spatialism are turned on their head, replaced by a vision of raw material reality.