PARIS.- Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents etcetera, an exhibition of Imi Knoebel’s new series of works. Knoebel has been testing the limits of the shaped ground since the 1960s as a means to investigate the fundamentals of painting and sculpture. Commenced in 2023, and each painted in acrylic on an almost-rectangular aluminium support, the etcetera works continue his exploration of the artwork as defined by the relationship between the pigments and their boundaries. In these new works, however, the ‘small-scale densifications’ of paint found in his recent works, as Max Wechsler described them, become eruptions of bold brushwork in contrasting tones.


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Born Klaus Wolf Knoebel in Dessau in 1940, he attended the Werkkunstschule Darmstadt in 1962, enrolling in a course taught by professors Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy. It was there that he met fellow student Rainer Griese, who was similarly enamoured with the work of Malevich, and the pair became known as Imi & Imi, a shortened version of 'Ich mit Ihm' ('I with him'). Whilst studying under Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Knoebel produced his defining early work, Raum 19 (1968), a modular structure composed of geometric shapes in unpainted Masonite, an unassuming industrial material that he has used throughout his career. Since the 1990s, he has increasingly used shaped aluminium as the ground for his paintings, which are visually reminiscent of Minimalist works by American artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, although Knoebel retains traces of the artist's hand in his gestural strokes of paint.

In addition to solo museum exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1975, Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Kunstmuseum Bonn in 1983, and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 1992, Knoebel's work was shown at documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977) and 7 (1982). In 1996, the Haus der Kunst in Munich organised a large retrospective and the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2002 with an exhibition of his work. In 2008, Dia: Beacon in New York presented Knoebel’s series 24 Farben – für Blinky (1977), created shortly after the untimely death of his friend and fellow artist Blinky Palermo. The following year, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin showed some of his most important works. In 2011, he created six monumental stained-glass windows for the Reims Cathedral in France, which had been damaged by German bombing in the First World War. The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg marked the artist's 75th birthday in 2014 with a comprehensive retrospective of his works from the past five decades. In 2016, his work was shown in dialogue with ceramics by Fernand Léger at the Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot, France, followed by a retrospective at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich in 2018.


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