Karin Kneffel
Fallstudien
10.05. – 21.06.2015

With the exhibition “Case Studies”, the Kunstverein Bremerhaven is providing an overview of the group of works on paper by the artist Karin Kneffel. More than 60 exhibits provide an insight into her work over the last 20 years. Many of the mostly small formats form autonomous work complexes, while others are studies for large-format works in oil on canvas, some of which the Kunstverein can show in the special exhibition room of the Kunstmuseum Bremerhaven. Around a quarter of the exhibits come from the artist’s studio. The exhibition is complemented by numerous loans from private collections and well-known galleries.

Karin Kneffel’s works have been shown and noticed nationally and internationally for more than 20 years. The much-acclaimed show in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, where she was the first painter to exhibit, recently ended. A large overview exhibition with 45 large-format works ran until March in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in La Coruna. The last retrospective in Germany was almost five years ago.

The Kunstverein had already dedicated an exhibition to the artist in 1994 at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven. Her first in an institutional setting. At that time, the artist showed large fire pictures, one hundred of the now famous animal portraits and, for the first time, watercolors with fruit. Karin Kneffel is represented with 20 of her animal portraits in a room of the Kunstmuseum.

The exhibition “Case Studies” at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven now deals with the group of watercolors, to which no separate exhibition has been dedicated up to now. To mark this occasion, a representative catalog with around 140 images of the works on paper and an introductory text by Walter Grasskamp is being published in cooperation with the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne.

Whatever Karin Kneffel chooses as a theme, the fruits, the Roman frescoes that contemporary viewers find themselves in front of, or the inclusion of Mies van Rohe’s villas in a world of images of mirroring and reflections: all of this is a meticulously worked out part of the story of our lives, which she transforms into impressive images.

The image spaces are complex and permeated by one driving force, the insistence on the pictorial investigation of our culture. Be it through the knowledgeable recording of entire architectural epochs or through the natural processing of media experiences. Film and photography are undoubtedly part of her painting.

Her pictures are as simple as they are precise, as profoundly ironic as they are compellingly serious. Only in this way do they awaken associations and feelings in us that make it clear to us why we need to be represented through art in our culture. This happens here in Karin Kneffel’s collectively binding pictures - expressively beautiful, as disturbing as they are full of conflict. In doing so, she is staking out new areas for art, both intensely and casually.

The self-confidence of her own, new interpretations of images is evident in each of her works.

An extensive catalogue and an edition of unique pieces will be published for the exhibition.

Curated by Thomas Trümper.