Karin Kneffel’s exhibition “Im Bild” in the Franz Marc Museum Kochel – Munich

Look, think, open your mind, talk to the paintings. Under no circumstances should you sink into them or even feel overwhelmed. Karin Kneffel describes exactly how she imagines the ideal viewer of her art. “I think in my pictures, so let him deal with what I’ve been thinking.” Sounds like an effort, but dealing with the painter’s mental spaces is a very entertaining affair. In the grandiosely painted confusion that she is currently offering in the Franz Marc Museum in Kochler, she playfully combines a painterly tour of discovery into the history of images with a reflection on how they are perceived.

The unusual concept that Karin Kneffel implements in the exhibition “Im Bild” has a long history. It begins in 2009, when Martin Hentschel, then head of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, asked Kneffel to an exhibition and linked the invitation to one condition: your paintings should relate to the exhibition building “Haus Lange Haus Esters”. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built the two houses, both now part of the art museums, in the Bauhaus style between 1927 and 1930 for friends who were silk manufacturers, Hermann Lange and Josef Esters. Kneffel begins to concern himself with the villas and is fascinated by the residential character of the rooms, the interior design of which was also influenced by Mies van der Rohe and his partner, the architect and designer Lilly Reich. Admittedly, the furnishing of the rooms is only documented in a handful of black-and-white photos from 1930. With “Haus am Stadtrand” Kneffel develops a first cycle of paintings and goes into the history of the villa as a residential building. Only years later did she notice that the historical photographs also included paintings and sculptures. “And I asked myself why, as a painter, I had never paid attention to it,” says Kneffel in Kochel.

Hermann Lange owned an outstanding Expressionist collection, which is widely scattered today. But most of the paintings can only be recognized poorly or not at all on the old photos. In a first step, Kneffel paints the blurred areas including their surroundings as grisailles, i.e. in gray tones, marks the picture with strong red brushstrokes and sets out to search for its history. She doesn’t ask experts, “I wanted to see how far I could get myself”. Some works are easy to identify, for example Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s street scene “Potsdamer Platz”, which formerly hung in the Langesche Wohnhalle and can now be seen in the Berlin National Gallery. She also easily recognizes Lehmbruck’s sculptures “The Bather” and “Sich Umwendede”, which once framed Marc Chagall’s “Hommage a Apollinaire” in the living room; today they are in the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. Oskar Kokoschka’s “Summer I”, which she finds in Dresden’s Albertinum, gives her much more trouble.

The finds resemble lightboxes

She processes her finds in two ways: On the one hand, she paints the works she has found at their new locations. The Lehmbruck figures, for example, in front of the museum’s shimmering blue, glass courtyard cube, the walls of which, in Kneffel’s version, are being cleaned with a lot of streaky soap scum. On the other hand, she paints the works in their original place, placing them in the rooms of the Lange house like light boxes. Admittedly, the view of the exhibits is never entirely clear. Glass panes fogged with haze, over which drops of water bead, or slanted blinds allow a view into a room, but at the same time give it something secret, forbidden, voyeuristic. These visual barriers were initially born out of necessity, says Kneffel. She didn’t want to just color the black and white photos. “I don’t know what color the curtains or the carpet were.” The panes of glass gave her the opportunity to immerse the facility in a colored light, to play with reflections and other effects. “At some point I also found them good as a commentary on the picture, they keep the viewer at a distance and make him think about his own position.”

In the museums she is content with taking photographs. Also in the Franz Marc Museum, where the latter is forbidden. But since her husband skilfully took over the distraction of the supervision, she managed to photograph August Macke’s “Große Promenade”, Kirchner’s “Zwei Tanzerin” and Wassily Kandinsky’s “Improvisation 21”. The huge painting, which shows the images in the exact presentation that Kneffel found in the museum at the time, welcomes visitors to the exhibition, accompanied by the original paintings.

“I paint representationally”

When asked how she would describe her style – photorealism, realism or illusionism – she has a simple answer: “I always tell the taxi driver that I paint representationally.” Kneffel, born in Marl near Recklinghausen in 1957 and once a master student of Gerhard Richter at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2008. Sometimes she even combines her teacher and her students in one picture, for example when she paints the latter while they are examining Richter’s famous “Betty” painting intensively during a visit to an exhibition.

Marc Chagall’s “Holy Cab Driver” (1911) had its place in the Lange family’s dining room. In her version, Kneffel enlivens the interior with plants, and a cake awaits on the set table. In the picture showing the Frankfurt Städel, where the cab driver is now hanging upside down – exactly the other way around as in the Lange building – Kneffel frames him with two sculptures, on the right Picasso’s bust of Marie Theres Walter, on the left Otto Freundlich’s “Ascension” ( rise). And he appears in a third picture, which shows the large exhibition room of the Marc Museum with all its details: floor, lamps, the large window with a view of the greenery, the distinctive armchairs – everything is perfectly reproduced, including the Chagall, the one in the original hangs on loan right next to Kneffel’s most recent work.

Through the project, the painter herself rediscovered her sympathy for the Expressionists, which she had lost in school. “The permanent presence of the prints in every classroom meant they were dead to me.” As a result, she gave a wide berth to Expressionism departments in museums. Dealing with the former Lange Collection put an end to this state of affairs. “Now I see the pictures in a new way and can look again.”

Karen Kneffel. In the picture, until 3.10., Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See. A catalog accompanies the exhibition Schirmer / Moselle appeared. Price: 39 euros (museum edition 29.80 euros)