Imi Knoebel valuation
Beuys student who took painting apart into coloured planes of board and metal, and made the room the work.
Imi Knoebel was born Klaus Wolf Knoebel in Dessau in 1940.
What a work by Imi Knoebel is worth
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Bio
Imi Knoebel was born Klaus Wolf Knoebel in Dessau in 1940. He studied at the Werkkunstschule in Darmstadt, where he met Rainer Giese, and in 1964 the two went on to Joseph Beuys's class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, both taking the name Imi. In 1968 he made Raum 19, named after the number of their studio at the academy: seventy-seven raw elements of hardboard and stretcher wood that can be stacked and arranged in endless combinations, now at Dia:Beacon in New York State. The work that followed takes painting apart in the same spirit: monochrome panels, stacked and layered boards, colours set side by side, the Mennigebilder of the mid-1970s in red-lead anti-corrosion paint, and later bright multi-part pictures in acrylic on wood and aluminium. Between 2011 and 2015 he designed nine stained-glass windows in red, yellow and blue for Reims Cathedral, and took no fee for them.
His works are unique, but they are built from parts, and a multi-panel picture or an assemblage of stacked boards must be complete and in its intended order; certificates and installation diagrams from the studio matter. The flat, unvarnished coloured surfaces mark easily and are hard to retouch. There is also a large output of editions, multiples, works on paper and prints.
Darmstadt, Beuys and Raum 19
The first six Reims windows were unveiled in 2011, for the eight-hundredth anniversary of the cathedral, and three more in 2015. The German Foreign Office paid for them, as a gesture of reconciliation for the cathedral's bombardment in the First World War.
The Mennigebilder take their colour and their name from Mennige, the red-lead paint used to protect steel from rust.
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