Comprehensive monograph on Silke Otto-Knapp's late work.
This volume combines a symposium on the work of Silke Otto-Knapp with her exhibition Bühnenbilder. Since the mid-1990s, Otto-Knapp pursued a unique approach that responded to and reflected on formal and thematic questions of representation and embodiment in the performing arts in the medium of painting.
The exhibition centred on Otto-Knapp's cycle of works Versammlung (2022), which was created for the Kunstverein in Hamburg during the artist's lifetime. Focusing on forms of ritualised gathering on stage, she explored the history of theatre, dance and film. Versammlung was placed in dialogue with her works from the last ten years.
This explored the formal development from individual works to panel paintings to painting as architecture in a space-filling, wall-less choreography that the artist had developed for the Kunstverein.
Silke Otto-Knapp, a German native artist (1970, Osnabrück – 2022, Pasadena), made black and white monochromes by applying watercolour to primed canvas, and combined motifs of landscape and decorative painting with a distinctive technique of layered and erased coats of paint to create works that are called by the LA Times as "visually elusive as quicksilver."
