The Hilti Art Foundation is presenting 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 both 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 artistic expression is the drawn line. He uses pencil, colored pencil, ballpoint pen, oil crayon or a knife to make it visible. He uses paper or wood as a medium. Only works in oil pastel can be seen in the exhibition. Although the line always defines the motif of the picture, Knöller uses the oil pastel not only in a linear drawing style, but also in a painterly, planar manner. This applies equally to his work on paper and on wood. The wooden medium also allows him to scrape or scrape the line out of the multi-layered, surface-filling ground with the help of a knife. This drawing with the knife lends the line - and thus the entire motif - a seismographic-like restlessness that is characteristic of Knöller's entire style.
Since the early 1980s, Paco Knöller's pictorial motifs and themes have focused on the human figure. Personal experiences of reality as well as inspiration from literature, film and science flow into individual works or series of works such as Monolog, Im Schlaf hast du dir alles erlaubt, Aufwachraum or Künstliche Paradiese. Opium poppy alphabet. The titles suggest that it is about elementary existential and borderline experiences. The human being, appearing in the picture as a barely tangible outline or only through the head and hands, is a fragile, often unhoused creature, subject to the polarity of body and spirit, of life and death, in which it attempts to find a form of existence that is probably always uncertain. However, Knöller also integrates the image of the human being into the context of the inorganic and organic world, into a complex web of earthly, plant and cosmic phenomena that is as seductively beautiful as it is latently threatening.
The exhibition title Under me the sky is borrowed from a series of works of the same name by Paco Knöller and refers to a spiritual change of perspective.
May 7 to October 15, 2023

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