KM_16 | KM_159

Body and physicality are omnipresent themes in art and are also discussed in the medium of painting. For Björn Knapp, a graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, they form the focus of his artistic work and his interest in painting.
Colourful, fleshy surfaces stretch across the canvas and meet their viewers. But the bodies depicted are neither representations nor references in their form. Rather, they pose the question of a shift, a change in the way we look. How do we look at bodies, with what sensitivity do we deal with them? Conscious of his own position as a white, male painter, Björn Knapp does not use the established narratives of art history, but feels the need to show new, unused bodies. Figures and forms that do not reproduce the "male gaze" but suggest a new physicality instead of using the historical canon.

Nevertheless, the artist draws on an existing pool of images as the basis for his creative process. However, this is not based on art-historically coded templates, but rather on his own, mostly spontaneously created photographs of body parts, rooms or landscapes. The subsequent processing decontextualizes and deconstructs the image elements, only to be re-arranged. As a loose collection of photographic sketches, they form the starting point for the painterly motifs.

The arrangement of the lines and the color gradations create the suggestion of a silhouette and the fleshiness of bodies. Specific attributes and characteristics are largely omitted in order to avoid the interpretation of possible representations and to depersonalize what is depicted - consequently, the concrete depiction of facial features is omitted. The contour of the body is literally in the foreground, as is its muted, clear coloring. It is surrounded by a non-physical space, the idea of a blue sky or the memory of green meadows and forests.

Although the depiction of bodies in nature takes up a classic theme of academic painting, Björn Knapp's painting attempts to break away from art historical tradition and to counter the usual forms of representation. It is never about romanticizing landscapes or physicality. Rather, it is the testing of a new way of looking at things and the design of a body that evades preconceived levels of meaning and interpretations that motivates the Düsseldorf artist to this constant debate.

Pina Bendfeld