Universal Heritage, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 130 x 120 cm aus der Serie “Plant of Opportunities”
“Alles ist Übergang, alles Bewegung, alles Fluss.” Zhuangzi
Ich hatte Christoph Knecht schon sehr lange auf meiner Sammlerliste stehen. Es gibt nicht immer den passenden Moment, die richtige Stimmung und die richtige Überzeugung. Christoph Knecht ist schon vielfach ausgezeichnet, er war Meisterschüler bei dem verehrungswürdigen Peter Doig und er hat sehr lange und geduldig seine Karriere mit Intelligenz, Fleiß und Beharrlichkeit voran getrieben. Gerade wenn man nur absolute Spitzenqualität liefern will, muss man selektiv sein, lange Durststrecken auch rein materiell überwinden und alles in ein nahtloses, quasi perfektes Gesamtkunstwerk einbetten lassen. Christoph hat dabei eine für mich spektakuläre Tiefe erreicht: “If you look deep into nature, you will understand everything”.
Was bei Christoph für die Natur gilt, dass wird in diesem Werk eindeutig und konkret. Auch wenn er von der Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie stammt, sein Werk ist zugänglich, verliert sich nicht in Metaebenen und Abstraktion, sein Werk ist nicht das eines Beuys, der es uns so unerhört schwer macht, überhaupt zu verstehen, worum es ihm geht. Ich sehe darin eine besondere Leistung, denn das Konkrete braucht Mut, das Abstrakte verliert sich im Uneindeutigen. In “Universal Heritage” nutzt er Maltechniken, wie sie leuchtender nicht sein könnten, das Werk erinnert in seiner Leuchtkraft an Werke der späten Gotik. Das Werk ist ein Füllhorn von Formen der Natur, von Blättern, Eicheln, Korblütern, Samen und Holz. Genauso zeigt er den Mensch in seinen Formen, einzelne Organe, Beine, Hirn, Hoden bis zur Eicheln, dessen Form sich auch in der Eichel des Eichenbaumes wiederfindet. Der Mensch ist eine Schöpfung der Natur, hier mal er sich selbst in Kontext seiner Schöpfung. Es ist das unvierselle Erbe, dass wir Menschen alle Teilen, gleich welcher Rasse oder Hautfarbe. Das leuchtende Werk findet auf einem tiefgründigen Untergrund statt, es könnte der ganze Kosmos sein. “If you look deep into nature, you will understand everything.”
Christoph Knecht war Gast an der Hong Kong Baptist Universität, als er diese Serie “Plant of Opportunities” schuf und fast könnte man meinen, Schlagzeilen über Organhandel hätten ihn in eine medizinische Vorlesungsreihe geführt, die er unerhört politisch ausschlachtet. Diese Ebene kann man zwar aufbauen, letztlich ist das Thema aber derart universell, dass man nicht mit einer politischen Kunstinterpretation aufwarten sollte – dafür gibt es viel fruchtbare, künstlerische Ebenen. Christoph Knecht würde sich nicht im politisch Konkreten verlieren wie AiWeiWei, diese Attitüde passt zu ihm nicht, er ist eher der Dokumentar des Sichtbaren wie Kommenden, er zeichnet Kultur auf, wie sie ist und wie sie viele nur noch nicht erkennen wollen.
Das Werk hat bei uns einen recht demonstrativen Platz in den Büroräumen meiner Frau vor dem Besprechungstisch gefunden, die Heilberufler, als vor allen Dingen tatsächlich Ärzte, in finanziellen Dingen berät. Was Sie dort an Anatomie sehen, löst den Menschen als Objekt aus dem beruflichen Kontext und verbindet ihn mit dem Kosmos und der Natur, ein explizites Werk, dass einen hervorragenden Opener für Anatomie oder aber schöngeistige Unterhaltungen bietet, ganz nach Perspektive und Interesse der Besucher. Daneben liegt noch ein Magazin, IDEAT, indem das Werk von der Galerie Franz van der Grinten demonstrativ platziert wurde. Ein starkes Zeugnis, wie sehr man an den Künstler glaubt, von dem hoffentlich noch viele Werke in diese Sammlung kommen werden. Das ist für echte Freunde der Kunst alles Beiwerk, aber das Werk bleibt so nutzstiftend und lebendig in seinem Kontext bis es einen anderen Ort findet.
Ein Katalog von Christoph Knecht ist aktuell in Vorbereitung, ich verweise hier auf seine Galerie und seine wunderschöne Webseite.
CV Christoph Knecht
1983 born in Karlsruhe
lives and works in Düsseldorf
2004-2012 Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Meisterschüler of Prof. Peter Doig
2009-2010 Chengdu Fine Arts College of SCCM, Chengdu, P.R.China
2011 Royal Academy of Arts, London
2012-2017 teaching assignment for painting, Institute of Fine Arts, TU Dortmund
since 2017 teaching assignment for painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
2018 guest lecturer at Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, P.R.China
GRANTS AND AWARDS
2019 BKC Art Award
2018 Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn (catalogue promotion)
2016 Artist-in-residence, grant of the Organhaus Artspace, Chongqing and the Office of Cultural Affairs, Düsseldorf
2013 Van Bommel van Dam prize
Jurgen Ponto Scholarship
Bronner Residency, Tel Aviv, Israel
2012 Georg-Meistermann-Grant
2010 A.T. Kearney Art in the office artist scholarship
2009 RölfsPartner art award
Artist-in-residence, grant of the Wang Chen Yun – Foundation, Mumashan Studios, Mumashan, P.R. China
2008 2nd prize of the XVth German International Triennial of Graphic Art
2007-2012
Scholarship of the Cusanuswerk, Bonn
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2018 Plant of Opportunities, Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf
Universal Heritage, Unit 7, Hong Kong, P.R. China
2017 Europa, Van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne
2016 Christoph Knecht, Organhaus, Chongqing, P.R. China
Europa, Künstlerforum Bonn (with Verena Schöttmer)
2015 open handed, MMK 3 – Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main (with Benjamin Hirte)
2014 Fortuna, Studio John & Joe presents, Düsseldorf (mit Rafram Chaddad)
2013 Monday Shrimp Club, Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf
2012 von der Nützlichkeit des Unbrauchbaren, Bruch & Dallas, Cologne
Christoph Knecht, Kunstverein Bretten
2010 Ken Ding, Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf, Germany (with Yu Ziwei)
2009 Shuangliu, Shuangliu, Mumashan Studios, Chengdu,P.R. China
2008 Christoph Knecht / Gerd und Uwe Tobias, Artleib, Düsseldorf (with Gerd and Uwe Tobias)
GROUP EXHIBITIONS (EXTRACT)
2019 ESPACIO COMPARTIDO / TIEMPO LIMITADO, Lugar de trabajo, Mexico City, Mexico
2018 72. Bergische Kunstausstellung, Museum Baden, Solingen
Massephase, Sprink, Düsseldorf
HERE AND ELSEWHERE, Edificio Vizcaya, Mexico City, Mexico
2017 Wiesenstück, Van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne
Erwarten Sie Wunder! Das Museum als Kuriositätenkabinett und Wunderkammer, Museum Ulm
Every Cult its Castle, Werkschauhalle, Spinnerei Leipzig
2016 WALD, Van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne
ZOO, Lepisen Art Foundation, Düsseldorf
KUMSITZ, KIT, Düsseldorf
Julian Cording, Sebastian Lundwig, Christoph Knecht, Seb Koberstädt, Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico
2015 Temporary Relocation, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel
Das Echo fragt warum, Van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne
2014 A glorious gift, Museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo, Netherlands
Reality Sandwich, Van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne
Der Traum des Kolibri, Galerie Luis Campaña, Berlin
Paul Pretzer, Christoph Knecht, Stefan Lenke, ATELIER Seidel / Geiss, Leipzig
2013 HIPPIEJUMP, Atelier Seb Koberstädt, Düsseldorf
Stelldichein, Bruch&Dallas, Cologne
Van Bommel van Dam Prize 2013, Museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo, Netherlands, and Rudolf-
Scharp-Galerie (of Wilhelm-Hack-Museum), Ludwigshafen
2012 Sunday Park, Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf
Single im Juli, Single Club, Düsseldorf
THE REALITY OF THE UNBUILT, Stiftung Insel Hombroich, Neuss
richtig schön aber falsch ist auch schön, Atelierfrankfurt, Frankfurt am Main
2011 Zwiefach, Forum Kunst, Rottweil
Roter Milan, Hawerkamphalle, Münster
Schwarzwald, Dominikanermuseum, Rottweil
2010 Retourkutsche, Künstlerverein Maerz, Linz, Austria
Landschaften, Städtisches Kaufhaus Leipzig
You can leave your head on, Schmelahaus, Düsseldorf
Artleib / Die Editionen, Artleib, Düsseldorf
2009 Rundblick, Temporary Gallery, Cologne
Concrete Spaceroom 4, Blueroof Gallery, Chengdu, P.R. China
First Chongqing Biennal for the Young Artists, International Exhibition Center, Chongqing, P.R. China
Inventur, Etching in Germany, Picasso Museum Münster
RölfsPartner Kunsttage, KIT Düsseldorf
2008 Gottesraum, art award of the Erzdiözese Freiburg, Morat Institut Freiburg
Interchange, Exhibition space of the Aichi Prefectual University of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan
1001 Bild, Villa de Bank, Enschede, Netherlands
Mischanlage von Dr. Urlaub, Zeche Zollverein, Essen
XVth German International Triennial of Graphic Art, Kunstverein Frechen
Spiegelbild, KIT Düsseldorf
Inventur. Etching in Germany, Kunstverein Reutlingen
Unterholz, Dina4 Projekte, Berlin
2007 61. Bergische Kunstausstellung, Museum Baden, Solingen
first view, Kunsthalle Erfurt
Porno total Illegal – für eine Liebe, Meyerhof, Vienna, Austria
the great show, Atelier Ostrowski / Sistig, Cologne
Grafik, Kulturbahnhof Eller, Düsseldorf
SINGLE-ROOTED FORESTS.
ON CHRISTOPH KNECHT’S SERIES “PLANT OF OPPORTUNITIES”
By: Dr. Thomas Köster, Cologne, July 2018
In the Year of the Tiger, Christoph Knecht is completing his first forest. He is standing in front of a canvas on which are sketched, against a dark background and modelled after a 19th century botanical text book, the outlines of a wormwood plant – Artemisia absinthium, also called ambrosia, or mugwort, associated in Ancient Greece with Artemis, goddess of the hunt, used as a potent herb against mouse infestation, witchcraft and insomnia in medieval times, and the basic ingredient of an intoxicating bohemian beverage during modernity – when it begins to sprawl. First, it is to be assumed, in the head, but thereafter mainly on the canvas.
Knecht bears down on the wormwood with a steel sponge and erases painted areas, blurring foreground and background as he does so, letting the semi-random results inspire him to new, abstract forms remini- scent of funnels, fans or acorns. Thus the rhizome of reality starts sprouting fantastical tissue that is neit- her foliage, nor stem, nor blossom, but pretends to be just that. In a process situated between automatic painting, controlled coincidence and composing overview it continues to grow, driving strange sprouts through the very boughs of the root stock, shooting all into the image space up to the limits of the herb. Until, finally, no more wormwood is left, only a forest that has grown from a single aerial root.
This is happening in 2010, during Knecht’s second sojourn in China, in the large, bright living room, repur- posed as a studio, of a professor’s apartment on the campus of an abandoned university town 45 minutes by car from the 14-million megalopolis Chengdu, where Knecht arrived several months prior on a student scholarship. Having left the noisy capital of Sichuan province behind, he is living all by himself, with only
a couple of swans, a handful of chickens, and some stray dogs for company, near the Himalayas, at the end of the world, with neither telephone nor Internet, with no postal address, no central heating, no feed- back from colleagues. On these huge grounds, in these icy, draughty rooms, he is literally all by himself. Sometimes he drives the 125cc cross bike that he has traded for a painting to the neighbouring farmer’s village and gets his hair cut by the slightly cross-eyed hairdresser there. Sometimes he goes out with his local graffiti crew, the first of its kind in Sichuan, to spray walls and bridges. For six days of the week he talks to himself, while on the seventh he is visited by his language teacher, the friend of a friend, who stays a few hours to help Knecht realise a childhood dream: to be able to speak and write Chinese.
In the complete solitude of foreign China, in 2010, one could say, Christoph Knecht is finding himself; his adoption of strange linguistic symbols allowing him to develop his own language of signs, a way of painting that will carry far beyond his stay in this country. Six years and many journeys to Israel or South America later, he will paint plants held by cubistically stylised hands, whose frail shadows turn into Arabic and Chi- nese symbols: paintings with titles, based on these word shadows, such as Alhamdullilah (2015), Allahu Akbar (2015), or Guangxi (2016). Now, in the Year of the Tiger, on the abandoned campus in the stillness of Sichuan, Knecht is starting a series he calls Plants of Opportunities. Knecht has painted about two dozen of these pictures to date, continually reformulating their motif. In their artificial evolution the forms continue their anatomical sprawl from picture to picture, growing spines, rib cages, teeth or mobile phones (but no mouths or ears!), breaking free from the ground on a free leg or floating on semi-antique runners’ calves like plant men into the distance; thus linking up into new life forms that owe their existence not to genetic scissors but – mostly – to paint tubes.
With their bodies made up of the finest, elaborately applied layers of skin, with their eye leaves, arm blossoms, bone sprouts and arterial stems, these anatomical growths never quite cross over into fauna, always remaining on the side of flora. And yet, they are more than pieces of forest and meadow – after all, Knecht is not a painter of forests and meadows, but the creator of his own vegetable cosmos with a carni- vorous aspect. New worlds emanate from the root, or, in his most recent works, from a foot or a heart. The paintings are partly done in a large format, partly in miniature, are sometimes inextricably sombre like the jungles of South America, sometimes reddish-light and tidy like a vegetable garden. On the latter paintings it can be seen most clearly that Knecht is a disciple of drawing and lines rather than of large-scale, expres- sive, painterly gestures.
It can take up to half a year for one of these Plants of Possibilities to be completed. During this process the artist, who is not afraid of using time-consuming, antiquated techniques, is eager not to be constricted by the technical law of the series. His only framework is to be the creeping, sprawling, sprouting and meande- ring of form. His techniques remain autonomous, experimental, flexible: Sometimes Knecht scratches and etches surplus colour from fields of bitumen; at other times he lets the forests grow out of the luminous painting surface by only afterwards adding the delineating background, the template for the “actual”, in an inversion of the act of painting that turns the rules of positive and negative upside down – thus placing in the foreground what used to be in the back during the sketching phase. He etches, he burns, he draws, until the parts give rise to the chaotic harmony of the whole. To the eye trained on reality, everything does not really fit in the end; and yet, the architecture of the painting makes it all seem perfectly self-evident.
In his studio in Düsseldorf, Knecht still creates plant worlds that are soothingly strange, and at the same time uncannily familiar. This only makes sense, as the cultural sources from which Knecht’s painting emanates are both Chinese as well as specifically German in nature. Since his second sojourn in China, Knecht’s favourite philosopher has been Zhuangzi, or Master Zhuang: the legendary holy man of religious Daoism, born circa 365 BCE, whose mysterious parables cultivate the doctrine of the relativism of the na- tural. Basically, Zhuangzi teaches, there is no good and evil, no becoming and elapsing, no separation and unification, no up and down, no front and back: All is transition, all is movement, all is flow. This thought lifts the painting and graphic of the Plants of Opportunities to lofty heights. And reflects back even to the very form.
What grounds Knecht’s paintings, which curiously feed from the bottom of the bottomless, are historical plant illustrations: Some of his sources of inspiration spring from The Flora of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (1885) by Cologne-based botanist, illustrator and educator Otto Wilhelm Thomé (1840-1925). After discovering Thomé during an online research, Knecht took a selection of his illustrations with him to the abandoned Chinese campus: The template for the first Plant of Opportunities (Absinth), from 2010, comes from this book. However, in Thomé we can also see those jaggedly truncating deformations of compressed stems that Knecht drew on his most recent Plants: What the former apparently drew in con- sequence of a disparity between proportions and leaf size, Knecht uses as an effective means of turning uncanny the domestic – and thus homely – character of farmers’ ears of grain, such as in his acrylic Carpus Plant on Paper Background (untitled, 2017). In its exaggeration, and stripped of its original function as a graphic workaround, this creates a wholly original ornamental geometry.
After his return from his first stay in China, specifically from Shanghai, where he spent a year at the age of 19 working as an English teacher, Knecht said he first wrestled with the previously foreign term ‘home’. That one of the first results of this examination, in addition to a hunter penetrating game and a potato hand grenade, should be a bronze doner kebab, says a lot about our culturally mixed and all-devouring global present. Accordingly, three aquatint works from the Plants of Opportunities from 2011 and 2012, which remind us of medieval books of herbs or medications, are printed on doilies and a flattened chips box, re- spectively. In Knecht’s alchemical surrealism, the magical meets the profane, skulls meet peanuts, goblets meet mayapple, head meets toe, medieval tusche etching meets fast food cardboard, noble artificial herb meets coffee party.
Here it might be important to note that Knecht, who was born in Karlsruhe in 1983, grew up in provincial southwestern Germany, and has held a black belt in taekwondo since his youth, was fascinated from child- hood on by all things Asian. He loved kung fu movies just as much as the graphic quality of Asian writing; he sprayed Chinese motifs onto garage doors and corporate facades as graffiti-for-hire; and he invested his first savings not in a Commodore 64 but in a statue of the Buddha. The Chinese, the Korean, the Japa- nese, in short: The difference in kind, in thinking, in living has always formed part, in Knecht’s life, of those memories that turn into feelings of identity, home, and rootedness while growing up. What might have appeared exotic by comparison was the petit-bourgeois narrow-mindedness living in half-timber houses.
But: Where is home, anyway, in these times? What does a global urban nomad still regard as home, cultu- rally speaking? Knecht finds an answer to this highly topical question in – naturally! – (pre-Christian) China, in the 4th century BCE, in Master Zhuang, who posited that “in the Dao alone lies our home”.
“The trees on the mountain rob themselves, the fat over the fire fries itself. Cinnamon can be eaten, and thus cinnamon trees are felled. Lacquer is useful, and thus lacquer trees are chopped down”, states Zhuangzi’s book, which in the year 742 AD was proclaimed by emperor Xuanzong as “the true book of the southern land of blossoms”: “Every man knows the utility of the useful, but no-one knows of the utility of the useless.”
“Of the Utility of the Useless”: This was the title Christoph Knecht gave to an exhibition in the free
project space “Bruch & Dallas” at Ebertplatz in Cologne. In these dilapidated surroundings of 1970s underground brutalism, three Plants of Opportunities were placed in a show window, constructed with considerable irony into a kind of Chinese folding-screen. Zhuangzi’s “utility of the useless” also describes, metaphorically, the societal as well as individual value of art in general; and, in particular, of Knechtian art, which despite its abstraction of the “real” wants to avoid withering up in the abstraction of indifferent pleasure.
In the surprisingly mature, and still young, oeuvre of Christoph Knecht there are many unknown, fruitful, useless-utilitarian continents to discover. Those wanting to discover them could do worse than to start with the single-rooted forests of the Plants of Opportunities.