Imi Knoebel (b. 1940)

Ohne Titel (rot) and Ohne Titel (rosa) are from the series ‘115 Siebenecke’ (‘115 heptagons’). True to his resolutely formalist practice, Imi Knoebel constructs hybrids of painting and sculpture, shapes compelling in their irregularity and resounding in their purity of hue. The seven-sided profile can be configured any number of ways, creating a dance of colour and edge, chaos and order; Knoebel brings forth a tonal and tactile pleasure in his heptagons, their kinetic angles aglow with physical, radiant colour bursting to break free.

Preoccupied with the interplay of colour and its material support, Imi Knoebel’s geometric abstraction builds on the legacy of Mondrian and Malevich. His interests in light, colour and form are often traced to his study under Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met – and shared a studio with – Blinky Palermo; this period, however, was predated by the Bauhaus influence of the Darmstadt Werkkunstschule, where Knoebel learnt the colour theories of László Moholy-Nagy and Johannes Witten. This eclectic and cerebral range of influences fostered a vivid, clear-sighted outlook that is distinctively his own, resulting in works of clean graphic force and serene emotive resonance.