Rome, at Gagosian, painter Karin Kneffel's solo exhibition on Renaissance wooden sculpture

From Nov. 11, 2022 to Jan. 14, 2023, Gagosian ’s Rome branch is devoting a solo exhibition to German artist Karin Kneffel (Marl, 1957), titled Face of a Woman, Head of a Child, where the new, eponymous body of work in which the artist tackles the human figure for the first time is presented. This is her third exhibition with the gallery and her first solo show in Rome twenty-five years after her residency at the German Academy of Rome Villa Massimo.

Throughout her career, Karin Kneffel’s artistic investigation has focused on the relationship between painting, space and time, layering and recombining objects, places, traces and events. Inspired by personal memories or sources from art history, her interiors and still lifes deftly make use of the representational potential of the medium of painting while emphasizing its inherently fictional nature. In a sharp digression from his previous work, Kneffel’s refined technique remains constant in this exhibition: the smooth, luminous surfaces of his oil paintings reveal an intense visual depth and conceptual complexity. In this never-before-seen series, the artist depicts the faces of ancient polychrome wood sculptures, characterized by mysterious and surprising proportions and framing. As in his Baroque still lifes, Kneffel exploits the full potential of his painterly language to depict in rough detail the strong contours and subtle nuances of carved and painted primitive faces.

Kneffel’s interest in early Nordic Renaissance sacred figures, by both anonymous and well-known authors, is long-standing. In these statues the illusionistic painterly effects, evident especially in the rendering of fabrics and the treatment of flesh tones, greatly enhance their emotional immediacy. For years the artist has photographed these sculptures when it happened, but this is the first time he has used his field research in a series of paintings. If these archetypes embody the widespread religious devotion of the time and its emerging humanistic ideals, in his paintings Kneffel secularizes them by eschewing any identifying attributions, titles and iconography - veils, halos and so on - to focus on facial features. Enlarging his subjects, he paints greatly enlarged close-ups by joining individual canvases of identical size in pairs. Although the woman and child are united by a marked physical resemblance, the distance of their gazes appears accentuated by the space between them.

Although some elements of this new series are reminiscent of the hyperbolic representations of apples or bunches of grapes in his still lifes, a constant in his repertoire, Face of a Woman, Head of a Child represents a departure from the visual paradoxes of Kneffel’s interiors. Made from a single point of view, these diptychs are meticulous representations of specific subjects, painted with great attention to the materiality of the original sculptures. Kneffel aims to convey the tangible qualities of the carved and painted wood carvings by capturing the play of light on their surfaces, highlighting their three-dimensional form and the sculptor’s stylistic choices. The artist emphasizes the distinctive features of each woman and child, accentuating their surreal artificiality through imperfections and physical originality. By minimizing religious iconography, Kneffel aims to present the sculptures as if they were highly subjective three-dimensional objects, imbued with a vitality enlivened by the contours and colors of the painting: the tender, protective gaze of the woman or the blush of the child’s cheek, like a ripe apple. Between these otherworldly juxtapositions, two couples from the modern era are presented: a young Kneffel with her infant son, now an adult, and another young mother with her son, close friends of the artist, emblematic of a new and more diverse Germany. Juxtaposing images from her own context with historical archetypes, Kneffel proposes portraiture, representation and family ties as elements of an ongoing dialogue between life and art.

Karin Kneffel was born in 1957 in Marl, Germany and studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf between 1981 and 1987. She lives and works in Düsseldorf and is a professor of painting at the Kunstakademie in Munich. His works are included in the following collections, among others: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden; and Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven in Germany. Exhibitions include Seduction and Distance, Ulmer Museum, Ulm, Germany (2006); Karin Kneffel: 1990-2010, Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany (2010); House on the Edge of Town, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (2010); Pavilion, Barcelona Pavilion, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona (2014); La ventana y el espejo, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, A Coruña, Spain (2014-15); Fallstudien, Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Germany (2015, then at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven and Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven, Germany, in 2015); Still, Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2019); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2020); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany (2022); Im Bild, Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See, Germany (2022); and Im Augenblick, Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR, Germany (2022).

For all information about the exhibition you can visit the Gagosian website.

Rome, at Gagosian, painter Karin Kneffel's solo exhibition on Renaissance wooden sculpture

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