Lot 427 D

With “Zwielicht” a series of paintings develop in the mid 1990s depicting countryside motifs in the twilight with a low line of horizon. In this theme, Karin Kneffel does without “obvious estrangement on a motivic level” and in doing so achieves a strategic goal to “make the distance between the reality of life and image visible” only ”by means of subtle image composition”. Stylistically, the countryside depictions follow that manner of painting that banishes any traces of the work process “which so plays to the appearance of her works. Karin Kneffel thus places her works in a context highlighting the character of her paintings as works of art. Because it is a historical requirement of genres such as landscapes or sill-life that what can be seen in them does not abide by the normality of everyday life breadth but will become clear in a subtracted/extracted and abstracted […] sense. Because it is only when we perceive the depiction of fires or fruit not merely for their most obvious information content, but first and foremost as visually interesting, that a painting can be free to become a piece of art”. (Daniel Spanke, Realismus ist anders, in: Achim Sommer (ed.), Karin Kneffel, Ausst.Kat. Kunsthalle in Emden, Köln 2001, p.10-11)