Art is a lie in a certain sense. And that is why it can tell the truth to the reality of everyday life without competing with it. The reality of painting is one reality, the reality of everyday life is another.
—Karin Kneffel
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Karin Kneffel. This is her first exhibition with the gallery.
Kneffel addresses the threshold between interior and exterior, and real and fictive space through a sophisticated play on reflectivity, opacity and transparency. Seaming together heterogeneous spaces and times in a flawlessly executed, seductively realist manner, she paints pictures that are perfectly constructed impossibilities. Although many of her sources actually exist, her image is first and foremost a surface, highlighting painting’s simultaneous ability to uphold and destroy illusions.
In these mannered pictorial spaces, Kneffel’s superb painting technique moves between materialization and dematerialization. On a quadruple—grounded canvas, she applies up to four layers of oil paint with the finest brush. Like veils, each covers the entire surface. Should she decide to change any element, it has consequences for the entire organization of the image. Her acute handling of rich color, texture, form, and space is resolutely apparent, equal to the visual games and enigmas that pervade Rococo and Mannerist painting, yet firmly rooted, formally and conceptually, within the vernacular information of her own time.
