Imi Knoebel

Klaus Wolf Knoebel, alias Imi Knoebel, was born on 31 December 1940 and spent his childhood near Dresden. His family moved to Mainz in 1950. From 1962 to 1964, he studied at the Werkkunstschule in Darmstadt, following the principles of the Bauhaus preliminary course by Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy. There he met Rainer Griese, and they both adopted the first name Imi – an abbreviation they called each other when they said goodbye. Fascinated by the personality of their teacher Joseph Beuys, the two transferred to the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1964. There, however, they consciously distanced themselves from the other Beuys students. In 1968, Knoebel created his first important work, the installation “Room 19”, named after classroom no. 19 at the academy, which Beuys had made available to them. In analytical series, Knoebel investigates the relationship between space, support and colour. He owes his reduction to the elementary coordinates of painting to his great role model Kazimir Malevich.