Imi Knoebel - If I can dream - image-1

Lot 627 R

Imi Knoebel - If I can dream

Auction 1135 - overview Cologne
01.06.2019, 14:00 - Contemporary Art
Estimate: 50.000 € - 60.000 €
Result: 80.600 € (incl. premium)

Imi Knoebel

If I can dream
1994

Acrylic on aluminium on wood. 120 x 120.5 x 14 cm. Signed and dated 'imi 94' verso on wood. - Minor traces of age.

The individual monochrome aluminium slats, painted according to Knoebel's principle of form and colour, are stacked on top of one another in such a varicoloured way that when viewed from the front, the colour combinations such as pale blue, russet, and pink or white via madder lake red to grey and other constellations are verifiable not only in their harmony but also in their provocative dissonance. Knoebel places the square in the form of a precisely constructed frame in front of an 'empty' or rather around an 'empty' wall surface. An incalculable number of possible combinations of the colour-coordinated components of painted surfaces, on aluminium slats, for example, can be traced back to the principle of the "Grace Kelly" pictures, a series which developed at the end of the 1980s and which lives from the respective colouring and interdependence between frame and framed picture field, lending each object of the picture its individual, unmistakable 'face'. Naturally, Knoebel's pictures lack any representational elements, even though titles conferred by the artist - for him a suffix that also organises time and place - would suggest this. The charm of the colour constellations represses this mundane casualness in the denotations and demands intensive attention to realities. The artist basically never compromises the balance of a polyphonic canon of colours. On the contrary, with his abstract, sometimes minimally structured and mostly emphatically colourful works, Imi Knoebel propagates an astonishingly mysterious tranquillity, which goes hand in hand with a feeling of enthusiasm for these object-like structures that cannot be more clearly explained.

MvL

Provenance

Art & Public, Geneva (label verso); private collection, Belgium; private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia