19 - Imi Knoebel

Imi Knoebel Pure Freude 59 2002 Acrylic on aluminium 160 x 115 x 4.5 cm. Signed and dated 'iMi 2002' and inscribed '59' verso on aluminium. - Minor traces of age. Provenance Directly from the artist; private collection, Lower Saxony Exhibitions Hanover 2002 (Kestner-Gesellschaft), Imi Knoebel, Pure Freude, exhib.cat.no.2, p.28 with col.illus. A light blue occupies most of the surface of Imi Knoebel’s 2002 work, ‘Pure Freude’. In the lower section, slightly right of the centre, there is an olive, rectangular field. The brushstrokes remain visible in vertical bands on the smooth aluminium panel. “Knoebel does not mix his colours. He does not blend them. He sets them. Each colour has its own support, an aluminium panel, which Knoebel sets into and against the others in constructing the picture.” (Carsten Ahrens, Alle Theorie der Farbe bleibt Theorie, Zu den Aluminiumbildern von Imi Knoebel, in: Imi Knoebel, Pure Freude, Carl Haenlein and Carsten Ahrens (eds.), exh.cat., Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover 2002, p.13, author’s translation) The work belongs to the series of the same name, Pure Freude (Pure Joy), with which the Kestner Gesellschaft opened its 75th anniversary year in 2002. Knoebel gave the series its title himself; it refers to the record label founded in 1979 by Carmen Knoebel, the artist’s wife. In Knoebel’s works from this series, as Max Wechsler describes it, the tension between the finest nuances of colour and the harshest colour confrontations comes to bear without any sentimentality, in a mood of serene cheerfulness. At the same time, the aluminium paintings reveal what Wechsler calls the “poetry of precision”: “Poetry of precision is a way of transcribing the equal presence of rationality and irrationality, of calculation and intuition, of reason and emotion that runs through the entire body of work; a crafted objectivity that situates the work, without any false magic, on a vibrant tension field between materiality and spirituality. In the more recent aluminium paintings, these qualities manifest themselves above all in a captivating simultaneity of constructive precision and painterly freedom, in which the intellectually complex compositional structure always remains comprehensible”. (Max Wechsler, Farbe konstruiert oder Die Poesie der Genauigkeit, in: Imi Knoebel. Pure Freude, Carl Haenlein and Carsten Ahrens (eds.), exhib.cat. Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover 2002, p.21)