Imi Knoebel / Rolf Rose / Henrik Eiben. Colour and Form

About

The group exhibition Imi Knoebel | Rolf Rose | Henrik Eiben. Colour and Form presents a wide range of non-representational works on paper, in the form of series or open-ended alignments. Something that all three artists have in common is their reduced vocabulary of forms, which is determined by colour. Areas of colour are interwoven and layered and define the space on the paper with their rhythm, density and tension. For his works from the series Gartenbilder / Garden Pictures, Imi Knoebel has painted sheets of plastic foil with acrylic paint and then cut shapes out of them by hand, using a cutter, arranging them on cardboard as a collage. Knoebel does not treat the garden as a (traditional) motif, as Max Liebermann did, for example, in his garden paintings, but as an abstract composition made up of seemingly arbitrarily arranged lines or strip structures, which can vary “infinitely”. The watercolours by Rolf Rose—three horizontal layers of colour gradations applied with broad brushstrokes—also trigger landscape associations in the viewer. However, Rose is primarily interested in a simple, harmonious and recurrent gesture, which corresponds to the watery, fluid state of the medium of watercolour and which takes shape through the movements of his hand and the paintbrush. The inexhaustible variations created by the interplay of colour and form also play a significant role in Henrik Eiben’s watercolours. His compositions of parallel undulating or interwoven lines and areas of colour that have been “breathed” delicately onto the paper, draw on Knoebel’s rhythmic “blocks of colour”. However despite the light and transparent nature of the paint application, the formal vocabulary of the works is also reminiscent of the volume and plasticity of his own sculptures and wall objects.