Karin Kneffel – Come in, Look out

In the organizer's words:

Karin Kneffel's paintings are both seductive and enigmatic. Seductive because she depicts objects that sometimes amaze with their richness of detail and precision. Karin Kneffel became known for paintings in which fruit is greatly enlarged and extremely close to the eye, with intense colors and vivid plasticity. She depicted grapes, peaches and apples on canvases up to 7 meters high. These paintings from the early 2000s give the impression of an exaggerated reality that hardly suggests oil painting on canvas. One might rather think of a pane of glass behind which the subject of the painting is located. Karin Kneffel has explored the photographic gaze, her painting shows blurs, unfolding multi-layered spaces, and in recent years she has repeatedly used panes of glass and mirrors as motifs. She has depicted interiors as seen through a window pane fogged up with water or through a pane on which many drops of water stand. More or less transparent substances such as water and glass are essential tools for the enigmatic nature of her pictorial motifs. In recent years, these motifs have increasingly included not only natural objects - fruit, landscapes, interiors - but also motifs from art history - paintings and sculptures by older artists that she found in museum rooms and photographs.

The exhibition at Museum Küppersmühle is an overview of her work with 70 paintings, supplemented by a small group of watercolors. The theme is the multi-layered spatiality in Karin Kneffel's paintings. Glass surfaces that allow views through or reflect instead. Water that creates blurs and can obscure the view. The gaze is either totally focused on the motif or diverted away from it using various methods. Karin Kneffel uses her means of variable focusing to set vision itself in motion and overcome the static nature of painted rooms and still lifes.