From his earliest Line Paintings until his latest works, Knoebel has undergone a multi-faceted evolution which has made it impossible to pinpoint him at the centre of any specific artistic movement. One might, rather, draft a cartography of specific European artistic energies based on his pioneering approaches. If, on occasions, he has been associated with specific early vanguard approaches, with the figure of Kazimir Malevitch standing out, or the Bauhaus, we should still endeavour not to pronounce too many truisms with regard to a formal discourse which, though it moved within the area of geometric abstraction and the semantic field of vanguard objectivity, simultaneously presents a warm and tactile character which reveals a brilliant theory of the visual arts regarding the multiple variations and reflections inherent to the manipulation of shape and colour. It is as such that we should bear in mind that the discovery of Malevitch’s black square on a white background invited him to draw, for hours and hours, thousands and thousands of lines which resulted in around 250,000 drawings which are now understood as the starting point of dematerialization in painting, which a few years later would even lead him to inscribe a wall with just the dimensions of an imaginary painting.
If in these early years Knoebel was able to present himself as the standard-bearer for reductionist painting, for the deconstruction of the pictorial process, for its dematerialization and for conceptual reflection regarding the work of the artist himself as a valid formula for the generation of a body of work and its display (the famous Raum 19 being a magnificent example of it), years later that disjointed fragmentation of the working elements that made up an installation would lead to a more unitary method through which the installation’s components, those pieces which filled floors and walls, started to take on the shape of a painting. First a painting with insertions and marks, then a re-materialization of the paint itself which his black and white paintings and his famous Schwarzes Kreuz from 1968, and from there through his work Kadmiunrot A (1976/84/90), the incorporation of colour and its intrinsic nuances. It was thus that, at the beginning of the 90s, the appearance of aluminium, at times as a surface, at others as part of the structure, laid the almost final foundations of what would be his subsequent work: superimposed bars and panels in multiple coloured compositions achieving a high level of sophistication and complexity led to more organic forms which have gradually abandoned the supposed geometry of his compositions to reveal irregularities, asymmetries and more corporeal forms which once again question the passage of time and surfaces with respect to space.
Now, in the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery, these new pieces, some of which might prove reminiscent of his recent Kartoffelbilder, are once again a call for the use of a less flat palette, of less contrasting mixtures, of nuanced tones which recompose their own existence through more curved tactile forms and less linear cuts. At the same time two works are on display from his famous Anima Mundi series where geometry and the scarcest of lines, the exact combination of colour and its very borders make up monochromatic surfaces adorned with outlines of colour. Finally, and to provide the most eloquent illustration of the varied and changing discourse of the more recent periods, the series of works on paper compiled under the title of Farben und Sta?be, gives a partial indication of the why and wherefore of his extensive work.
Without giving rise to an especially metaphysical or spiritual content (Knoebel’s work never had one), cosmic and organic elements inundate the works on display which place particular emphasis on a wise and complex discourse full of new enigmas and question marks.