Thoralf Knobloch - Contemporary Art London Thursday, June 21, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Wilkinson Gallery, London

  • Catalogue Essay

    In works such as the present lot, Thoralf Knobloch continues to add to the active dialogue found in contemporary art between painting and photography. Using his own meticulously prepared photographs as a starting point, the artist employs works such as the present lot to question the intrinsically subjective and humanizing process of painting’s impact on an original image. As with photography, the artist controls the action with his choice of content and framing, but Knobloch’s technique departs the more literal photographic medium at this point and ventures toward abstraction, muting or amplify colors beyond their natural capacity and ravaging focus and depth of field. These steps are conscious departures from the real, and assist in distancing narrative from Knobloch’s work. The viewer must engage the formal composition, as well as the various disjunctive visual elements impossible to express with photographic means in order to interact with these images. In the present lot, Merkwürden, it is possible to engage the work both on an abstract level, interpreting the work as flat but nonetheless dramatically painterly, as well as viscerally--as the landscape it is inescapably based on.

66

Merkwürden

2003 - 2004
Oil on canvas.
66 7/8 x 98 3/8 in. (169.9 x 249.9 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “Knobloch, Merkwürden, 2004/2003” on the reverse.

Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 ≠♠†

Sold for £36,000

Contemporary Art

22 June 2007, 4pm & 5pm
London