The Actual Picture: On Karin Kneffel’s Painting
In 2021, Karin Kneffel embarked on a new series of oil paintings, different from anything she had made before. Derived from her photographic studies of early Northern Renaissance polychrome-painted wood sculptures, these portrait diptychs appear for the first time in the exhibition Face of a Woman, Head of a Child at Gagosian, Rome. Art historian Ulrich Wilmes provides a first look, noting how Kneffel links pictorial and empirical realities, past and present, in a topic of universal human significance.