Lot 54 D

“The weather, namely a murky, completely rainy, soggy, swirling summer, was also the impulse in France that prompted Imi, long since prepared by the Drachenzeichnungen of 1980/84 or the decisions and observations of 1983, to create the Sommer 84 pictures. These pieces, characteristically on hardboard, but disregarding their usual, orderly, measured handling, were not aimed at the picture as a result, but at the unleashed, uncontrolled movement breaking directly out of the physical, picture plate-maltreating, eruptive process of painting itself. […] In any case, in the Sommer 84 pictures, that important adversary to the clear, purified forms came again right to the fore, which then, in the black Schlachtbilder (1990), one might almost say classically, dramatically exaggerated and (as in a later reference to Lucio Fontana, whom Knoebel admired), became a form itself.” (Johannes Stüttgen, Arbeitsbericht 1966-1996 zu Imi Knoebel, in: Marja Bloem and Hubertus Gassner (ed.), Imi Knoebel, Retrospektive 1968-1996, exhib.cat. Haus der Kunst München, Ostfildern 1996, p. 42-43).