Karin Kneffel

Images come from other images. The figures I painted oscillate back and forth between depicted sculpture and reality, becoming more real in the picture than in the sculpture.
—Karin Kneffel

Gagosian is pleased to announce Face of a Woman, Head of a Child, a new body of work by Karin Kneffel in which the painter addresses human portraiture for the first time. Opening on November 11, 2022, this is her third exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition in Rome in twenty-five years since her residency at Villa Massimo.

Throughout her career, Kneffel has reflected on the relationship between painting, space, and time by layering and recombining things, places, traces, and incidents in a seductively realist manner. Whether inspired by personal memories or art historical sources, her interior scenes and still lifes deftly exploit the medium’s representational potential while underscoring its inherently fictive nature.

Despite the dramatic shift in subject matter, Kneffel’s refined technique remains consistent, the smooth and luminous surfaces of her oil paintings revealing great visual depth and conceptual complexity. In this unprecedented approach, she depicts the faces of historical polychrome wooden figures, rendered uncanny and arresting by upscaling and cropping. As in her baroque still lifes, Kneffel harnesses the full powers of her painterly methods to describe in granular detail the strong contours and subtle nuances of each rustic sculpted and painted visage.