The Hilti Art Foundation is showing a monographic exhibition with Paco Knöller (*1950 in Obermarchtal). It was conceived in close collaboration with the German artist.
The exhibition comprises around 40 works from the 1980s to the present day and focuses on human existence in the context of human and natural history. Paco Knöller's works are complemented by sculptures from the collection of the Hilti Art Foundation, including works by Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp and Germaine Richier.
Knöller's primary means of pictorial expression is the drawn line. To visualize them, he uses a pencil, colored pencil, ballpoint pen, oil crayon or a knife. He uses paper or wood as a medium for his image. In the exhibition, only works in oil crayon can be seen. Although the line always defines the motif of the painting, Knöller uses the oil crayon not only in a drawing-linear way, but also in a painterly and two-dimensional way. This applies to working on paper as well as on wood. In addition, the wood image carrier enables him to scrape or scrape the line out of the multi-layered and surface-filling ground with the help of a knife. This drawing with a knife lends the line – and thus the entire motif – a seismographic restlessness that is quite characteristic of Knöller's entire handwriting.
Since the early 1980s, Paco Knöller's pictorial motifs and themes have focused on the human figure. Personal experience of reality as well as suggestions from literature, film and natural sciences flow into individual works or series of works such as Monologue, In Sleep You Have Allowed Yourself Everything, Recovery Room or Artificial Paradises. Opium poppy alphabet. The titles suggest that it is about elementary existential and borderline experiences. The human being, in the picture as a barely tangible outline or appearing only through head and hands, is a fragile, often homeless creature who is subject to the polarity of body and mind, of life and death, and tries to find in it a form of existence that is probably always uncertain. At the same time, however, Knöller integrates the image of the human being into the context of the inorganic and organic worlds, into a complex web of earthly, plant and cosmic phenomena that are as seductively beautiful as they are latently threatening.
The title of the exhibition, Unter mir der Himmel (Under Me Heaven), is borrowed from a series of works of the same name by Paco Knöller and refers to a change of intellectual perspective.
7 May to 15 October 2023
