Karin Kneffel

“My interest in making art is to produce a sense of doubt, something I have not yet really grasped,” Karin Kneffel has said. Kneffel’s paintings contemplate the fictions and illusions the artist creates on a canvas; her training with Gerhard Richter is evident in her photorealist canvases. Kneffel aims to create layered, multidimensional spaces that situate her canvas as the limits of a vividly realized painted world. In recent work, Kneffel has painted spaces designed by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe based on archival photos. She positions the canvas as a foggy or dew-covered window into the architectural space inside, revealing a masterful handling of perspective and distortion but also casting the space as water-logged, even surreal. Similarly, the paintings demonstrate a critical eye toward the act of looking at a painting. The window creates a distancing effect, casting the viewer as an outside voyeur in a separate time and space.