Monday, June 29, 2009

Modern Art Oxford



The first major exhibition in the UK of the London-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp. Devised as a single installation for Modern Art Oxford's Upper Gallery, the exhibition presents thirteen paintings produced by Otto-Knapp between 2005 and 2009.

Silke Otto-Knapp works with watercolour and gouache on canvas, repeatedly building up and dissolving the surface to create paintings of subtle effect. Drawing on a photographic archive of visual sources that refer to the spatial staging of the formal garden and the choreography of modern dance, Otto-Knapp's tautly constructed yet mutable compositions are rendered in layers of diluted pigment and metallic silver monotones. Recent paintings reveal the artist's evolving investigations into the construction of pictorial space with a renewed approach to the figure and colour through which more complex narratives emerge. 

The exhibition will be Silke Otto-Knapp's first in a public Gallery in the UK since her earlier survey at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf in 2003 and her display at Tate Britain as part of the Art Now series in early 2005. To coincide with the exhibition, Modern Art Oxford is producing a fully illustrated monograph on Otto-Knapp's work with essays by the exhibition's curator Suzanne Cotter and writers Jan Verwoert and Catherine Wood. Published in collaboration with the Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, and Koenig Books, London.

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