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"It's Knoebel summer in Berlin," declares Monopol, while Vernissage TV reports that the two Knoebel exhibitions provide art lovers with a great excuse to travel to the German capital. According to Niklas Maak of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in an "act of productive vandalism," the "purist of color" (Focus) has radically transformed the Nationalgalerie by covering the glass of the Mies van der Rohe building in white paint. In doing so, Knoebel unites "the two greatest movements of post-war modernism by covering the industrial, clinically smooth architecture (
) with informal gestural painting." At the Deutsche Guggenheim, this "painting transformed into space" can be experienced in another way: "The new paintings of the series Ich Nicht provide a laconic answer to Barnett Newman's painting Who's afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, which Knoebel takes apart here and rebuilds as space: the painting is made spatial, concrete, and can be entered into." Sebastian Preuss of the Berliner Zeitung also describes Knoebel's investigation of art history: "He dissects Newman's work into its components (
) and explores the myth of the American color field painter. It's not a storm of images, but an endless search for what constitutes a work of art, what it actually consists of." For Michael Kohler of art, Knoebel's "paintings are always objects as well: in his early works, he painted geometric color fields on panels suspended in space; later, he layered painted boards over one another to form a kind of relief (
) this mixture of color field painting and bricolage comes to expression beautifully in the Ich Nicht series."
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