Silke Otto-Knapp's current show Interiors at Gavin Brown's Enterprise features "rooms, screens (partitions, windows, paintings within paintings) and stages [that] together form a picture of what painting could be as a space of appearance: spaces become screens; screens become paintings; paintings become stages" (from show's press release). Her soft, whisper-like images depict ballerinas, Victorian era ladies, and elegant salons accessorized with billowy curtains, lush lounges, and many paintings.
The London-based Otto-Knapp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1970 and studied at the University of Hildesheim in Germany and Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. She paints in watercolors on canvas, "which allows her to repeatedly wash down her images, reworking them layer by layer, and therefore create pictures of great translucency and delicacy" (from tate.org.uk). Her images appear faint and gauzy, giving them a haunting, ghostlike quality. Her color palette ranges from barely-there muted to electrically vivid.
Otto-Knapp's paintings beautifully explore "the settings in which women have appeared and performed throughout the history of modernity," and elegantly represent "the moment and motion of appearance itself: the way spaces open up, and how figures make their appearance on the stage of these spaces" (from press release). From salons filled with over-stuffed furniture, to figures snugly cramped into tight frames, to large, open stages, Otto-Knapp creates entrancing, inviting scenes. Learn more at Gavinbrown.biz. Through February 20th.
Group (walking), 2009
Three Sisters, 2009
Red Room, 2009
Every Afternoon, 2009
Interior (purple and red), 2009
Interior (West 40th Street), 2009
Quartett (with frame), 2009
Verstarker, 2009
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