Imi Knoebel: Etcetera

Duarte Sequeira is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Imi Knoebel at the gallery's Hannam venue in Seoul, organized in collaboration with Jahn und Jahn. Coinciding with Frieze Seoul 2025, the exhibition introduces Knoebel's Etcetera series to audiences in South Korea for the first time. While Knoebel has exhibited in Seoul on several occasions, this marks the debut of this particular body of work in the region.

In this series, Knoebel, known for his minimalist and conceptual approach, shifts from purely monochrome surfaces to an abstract form language reminiscent of his earlier works. Hatched brushwork, sometimes applied in thick paint layers, forms a background defined by single colors like deep red, delicate yellow, and pink. The metal support shines through where the paint layers have left empty spaces on the unprimed and sanded aluminum. Gestural signs and hints of geometric shapes overlay the background. Painted expressively, the surface features vertical and horizontal lines, circles, and fragments that evoke letters and numbers. Knoebel contrasts the traditional rectangular format with irregularities that challenge our visual habits and the strictness of geometry.

Imi Knoebel's work is among the most radical within the context of postwar abstraction. Taking nothingness as a starting point, an idea famously encapsulated in Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, Knoebel developed his own artistic vocabulary of forms. This vocabulary is not to be understood as something new, but rather as an expression of hope from which he draws. His position, which he conveyed in an interview at the time of his retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, is to "have no imagination at all. And that's sufficient. And you don't need more. [...] What did Malevich say? Pure experience."1 He sees himself as a painter and a worker, but not an artist.

While studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the legendary class of Joseph Beuys, he began to work in analytical series. These series are investigations into form, color, material, light, and line. In some cases Knoebel goes so far as to dematerialize painting by exhibiting a stretcher without canvas. Increasingly resolute, he frequently inscribes the dimensions of the picture onto the wall. In terms of the development of his work, Knoebel is anything but linear. He surprises with the reacti-vation of earlier concepts and defies categorization, even now. By juxtaposing polarities and connecting them, he unites in his painting the antagonism of forms.2

1 Catalogue Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 2014-2015, p. 24

2 ibid. p. 238