Karin Kneffel’s paintings are both seductive and enigmatic. Seductive, because she places objects in the picture that sometimes amaze with their richness of detail and accuracy. Karin Kneffel became known for her paintings in which fruit is greatly enlarged and extremely close to the eye, with intense colours and vivid plasticity. She depicted the grapes, peaches and apples on canvases up to 7 metres high. These paintings from the early 2000s give the impression of an exaggerated reality that barely conjures up the idea of oil painting on canvas. One might rather think of a pane of glass behind which the subject of the picture is located. Karin Kneffel has explored the photographic gaze, her paintings show blurs, unfolding multi-layered spaces, and in recent years she has repeatedly used panes of glass and mirrors as motifs. She has depicted interiors as seen through a window pane fogged up with water or through a pane on which there are many drops of water. More or less transparent substances such as water and glass are essential aids for the enigmatic nature of her pictorial motifs. In recent years, in addition to natural objects – fruit, landscapes, interiors – these motifs have increasingly included motifs from art history – paintings and sculptures by older artists that she found in museum rooms and photographs.

The exhibition at Museum Küppersmühle is an overview of his work with 70 paintings, supplemented by a small group of watercolours. The theme is the multi-layered spatiality in Karin Kneffel’s painting. Glass surfaces that allow views through or reflect instead. Water that creates blurriness and can obscure the view. The gaze is either totally focussed on the subject or diverted away from the subject using various methods. Karin Kneffel uses her means of variable focussing to set vision itself in motion, overcoming the static nature of painted spaces and still lifes.