Meisterschüler von Karin Kneffel - MOONSHOT - MASTERSTUDENTS OF KARIN KNEFFEL

Karin Kneffel is curating a group exhibition with her master students at Galerie Jahn.

Karin Kneffel is currently without a doubt one of Germany’s most respected and famous artists. As a master student of Gerhard Richter, she was heavily influenced by one of the most important international trailblazers of contemporary painting. She has been passing this influence and what she has learnt from her own artistic work on to her students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich for many years. It’s the genuine interest in painting and unwavering belief in art that distinguishes all her master students. The unquestioning belief in their own creative power and personal expression. She is now selecting works by master students and compiling them in a group exhibition for Galerie Jahn. This exhibition presents four of her master students who she is convinced are successfully pursuing their own artistic path and will continue to do so.

Felix Rehfeld develops his pictures in a virtuoso manner by consciously using colour in its materiality. For him. colour is a means for representation on the one hand and to show material in all its fascinating complexity as a substance. The resulting sculptural pictures play with the difference between the image and the material. Rehfeld starts with a photographic template and creates abstract, powerful painting with pictorial depth. The pictures are fascinating due to their illustratability and look almost realistic despite their highly abstract nature. For him, it’s all about painting that finds and brilliantly asserts its legitimation through its individual characteristic style and self-determined personal imagery.

Sibylle Springer’s pictures are complex with a rich selection of references. They are not simple abstractions but the results of long, intensive research into historical works of art and their genesis. The content and form of these representational role models are understood by her down to the tiniest detail and then transformed into a painting in a complex abstraction process. The results are wonderful abstract pictures, which no longer or just slightly refer to their role models, and can be considered as the results of an individual, complex and highly subjective art process.

Jonah Gebka works with painting’s classic subjects. The pictures live from the complexity of well-known subjects and complement that enigmatic subtleness that we are familiar with from films and novels. A landscape is no longer an illustration or memory of a real place today but a place of diverse image narratives that we associate with it. Besides personal experiences, they may be scenes from films, stories or image overviews of today’s search engines. Gebka uses the classic painting methods of oil and watercolour painting as well as various copying techniques and computer programs. The results are complex pictorial metaphors, which pose and impressively answer questions regarding the picture and today’s media-related permutations of it.

Marile Holzner continues the tradition of art that focuses on the object in her work. A picture is an object and not a portrayal of something and does not embody an image narrative. It is what it is and draws on the tradition of Minimal, Conceptual or Process art with its sometimes ironic Postmodern refractions. It’s about formal aspects and the relationships between pictorial elements and compositions. She works with industrially produced papers and wooden boards that she draws or paints structural elements or drawings on. These bases are then cut up and reassembled in a new way. The cut bases and structural elements on them are consequently recomposed and the industrial preform and structural drawings are considered in relation to how they differ to the resulting newly composed form. The aim is to construct complex objects with many layers.

We no longer see modern art from a formalist Modernist or polemic Postmodernist perspective today but we consider the individual artist and their personal and subjective artistic expression. This perspective over recent years searches once again and above all for individuality and personal consistency in the individual’s work. It is the convictions and attitudes towards art and the work’s artistic consistency and coherence that leave the strongest impression on the observer. This is very clearly and impressively demonstrated in this group exhibition.