Lot 642 D

Karin Kneffel has been working intensely with the aesthetic expressiveness of the fascinating element of fire since the 1990s. Works of varying sizes are created, in which the manifold aspects of fire are portrayed time and again under various nuances.
“Feuer XI (1) - (3)” are the first three works from the series of twelve fire pictures that were executed in 1993 and numbered in the order of their creation. In these pictures Kneffel shows details of the blaze of a stack of wood, concentrating on different stages of the development of the fire and flames. In their fragmentary character, the works focus on the pictorial power of the moving flames as well as the formation and expansion of the smoke. “Karin Kneffel's fires are not incident pictures in which an event could be retraced. All of Karin Kneffel's works are deprived of the dimension of time; in the fire pictures, this additional strategy of alienation and image creation is particularly apparent because we understand the great variability and expansive power of fires. Stripped of its everyday reality and character of event, the fire is presented above all as an aesthetic phenomenon. The fleeting, immaterial flames, formless yet continually taking on new shapes, exert a great optical attraction in these pictures, which can only unfold their effect from the perspective of distance”. (Daniel Spanke, Realismus ist anders, in: Achim Sommer (ed.), Karin Kneffel, exhib.cat. Kunsthalle Emden 2001, p.10).