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131
Imi Knoebel, Pencil drawings, untitled, 1972

Chapter: Seelenfenster - Gesture, Movement, Cipher

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A new, better world
Even before beginning his studies in Joseph Beuys’s class, which he attended from 1965 to 1971, Imi Knoebel and his friend Imi Giese had already engaged intensively with the Russian avant-garde and with Kazimir Malevich, particularly his essay Suprematism and the Non-Objective World. Russian Constructivism represented one of the great utopias of the early twentieth century: an intellectual, clear, geometric art that would help create a new and better world. Yet while Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Tatlin are now firmly established figures in art history, their ideas were largely unknown in West Germany and at the Düsseldorf Acaddemy during the economic miracle years.

Militant like Kraftwerk
With their closely cropped hair during the hippie era, the two artists styled themselves like Russian revolutionary artists—militant like the band Kraftwerk or, later, the punk and new wave scenes. Their studio also differed fundamentally from that of their fellow students. Their classmate Johannes Stüttgen recalls: “Everything in it—the entire inventory, the hardboard panels, the hardboard cubes and blocks, the roof battens, the pieces of wood, brackets, and tools—everything was marked out, measured with a compass, reduced, minimal, pure, perfect, aligned, measured, layered, precise, strict, orderly, clean, professional.”

Minimal and the hardware store
After the death of his friend Imi Giese in 1974, Knoebel continued to work with basic forms such as the cross, the line, and the rectangle, developing a reduced, conceptual art closely related to Minimal Art, but also to the hardware store and industrial production. During the same period, in the early 1970s, he experimented with light. He sought to move away from the materiality of paint, panel painting, and canvas and into everyday, real pictorial space.

Through the night with a light cannon
Knoebel also incorporated performance, driving through the city at night with a light cannon mounted on his car and projecting abstract forms onto building facades, or out of the window of his studio. He modified slide frames, blackening their glass windows and etching parallel straight lines into them. When projected onto architecture, interiors, or furniture, these lines distort and even seem to break apart. Photographs of these experiments evoke a cosmic atmosphere. In 1972, they resulted in gestural pencil drawings that capture this radical, transcendent energy and sense of departure. With this spirit, Knoebel’s art reminds complacent consumer society of the revolutionary promises of modernism.


Audio

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Imi Knoebel, Ohne Titel, 1972
Graphite on paper. Six works
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Sammlung Deutsche Bank

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