Imi Knoebel

Born Klaus Wolf Knoebel in Dessau, Germany, in 1940, Imi Knoebel studied at the Werkkunstschule Darmstadt from 1962 to 1964 before enrolling at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he worked under Joseph Beuys until 1971. He has lived and worked in Düsseldorf ever since, developing a body of abstract work that has placed him among the most consequential figures in postwar European art. The foundations of his practice were laid early and decisively: Raum 19, a multipart wooden installation completed in 1968, introduced the principle of assembling independent elements into shifting pictorial and spatial configurations, and has been consistently identified as the generative starting point for understanding his artistic development. That same year he mounted his first solo exhibition, Imi Art etc., at Galerie René Block in Berlin, and showed collaboratively with Ralf Giese at Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, followed by a solo presentation at Art & Project in Amsterdam in 1969.

Over the decades that followed, Knoebel's work entered the programs of major institutions across Europe and North America. Solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg traced a sustained institutional engagement through the 1980s and early 1990s. A particularly concentrated moment came in 1996, when solo presentations opened simultaneously at Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée de Grenoble, the IVAM Centre Julio González in Valencia, and the Ludwig Forum in Aachen — a breadth of simultaneous institutional attention that underscored his standing across the continent. He also participated in group exhibitions including documenta VIII in Kassel in 1987 and Metropolis at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1991. A retrospective mounted at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2014 marked his seventy-fifth birthday, and a solo presentation at Dia:Beacon in New York followed in 2021. His work is held in the collections of the Dia Art Foundation, The Broad in Los Angeles, and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.

Knoebel is primarily represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, and Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt, with whom he has maintained a long exhibition history including und was machst du in 2020, Standing Paintings in 2021, and etcetera in 2023. Recent solo presentations include Das Und Das at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg in 2024, Recent Works at De Brock Gallery in Knokke-Heist in 2024, Sculpture 2 at Gallery Ludorff in Düsseldorf in 2025, and Once Upon a Time at White Cube in London in 2023. A solo exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris ran from June to July 2025, and further solo presentations at Dep Art Gallery in Milan and Galerie Christian Lethert in Cologne are documented for 2026, confirming the undiminished momentum of an artist whose practice continues to evolve across more than six decades.