Lot Essay
An essay in colour, line and geometry, AIINAA is a work relating to Imi Knoebel’s series of Milano paintings, created in 2002. Comprising blocked square segments – some monochromatic, some fronted by coloured lattices – these works represent an extension of the artist’s aluminium paintings, initiated in the 1990s. In these near-sculptural creations, Knoebel sought to bring his investigations into three dimensions, exploring the interaction of light and hue through interlocking configurations of aluminium bars. A student of Joseph Beuys during the 1960s, he absorbed the teachings of Mondrian, Malevich and László Moholy-Nagy, operating through an eclectic mix of scientific rigour and tongue-in-cheek subversion. With the artist Rainer Giese – a fellow Malevich-enthusiast – he formed the duo ‘Imi & Imi’, with both men adopting the name as an abbreviation of ‘Ich mit Ihm’ (‘I with him’). Over the next five decades, Knoebel would pursue a wide-ranging, multi-media enquiry into the grammar of colour and form.
Though rooted in his readings of art history, Knoebel’s chromatic enquiries sidestepped the transcendental, political claims of his Modernist and Abstract Expressionist forebears. Colour, he believed, was a non-fixed entity, which derived meaning from its shifting visual properties: its radiance, luminosity, saturation and depth, all of which were infinitely mutable when juxtaposed with contrasting tonal values. Through their rigorous geometric structuring, his works take on an alphabetic, near-linguistic quality, as if seeking a means of codifying these unlimited variations. Yet Knoebel’s approach remains entirely heuristic: ‘I want nothing but to get to the colour’, he explains. ‘I put the colours on, lay them in and try to gain a colour this way. I use really diverse combinations. That keeps it open. There is no colour I don't work with, so there is no pat system. Along the way, you can get to really beautiful paintings that you never had in mind’ (I. Knoebel, quoted at https://www.jca-online.com/knoebel.html [accessed 28 June 2018]).
Though rooted in his readings of art history, Knoebel’s chromatic enquiries sidestepped the transcendental, political claims of his Modernist and Abstract Expressionist forebears. Colour, he believed, was a non-fixed entity, which derived meaning from its shifting visual properties: its radiance, luminosity, saturation and depth, all of which were infinitely mutable when juxtaposed with contrasting tonal values. Through their rigorous geometric structuring, his works take on an alphabetic, near-linguistic quality, as if seeking a means of codifying these unlimited variations. Yet Knoebel’s approach remains entirely heuristic: ‘I want nothing but to get to the colour’, he explains. ‘I put the colours on, lay them in and try to gain a colour this way. I use really diverse combinations. That keeps it open. There is no colour I don't work with, so there is no pat system. Along the way, you can get to really beautiful paintings that you never had in mind’ (I. Knoebel, quoted at https://www.jca-online.com/knoebel.html [accessed 28 June 2018]).