50ft queenie

For her exhibition at the 2005 Istanbul Biennial Silke Otto-Knapp installed a group of recent paintings depicting female figures and gardens in the faded art deco grandeur of the almost derelict Deniz Palas apartments, which overlook the Golden Horn.

Presented unframed on cracked and flaking walls, in rooms with bare floorboards, drenched in daylight from the windows, Otto-Knapp’s paintings seemed at once to belong both to a vanished era – the luxurious world which the apartments would have epitomised in their early twentieth century heyday – and the quotidian, immediate present.

Studio wall Photo: Marcus Leith enlarge

The apartments seemed to offer perfect viewing conditions for the paintings, enhancing their symbolic complexity and their fleeting surface beauty. For Otto-Knapp’s recent paintings have an unsettling – and beguiling – tendency to disappear before our eyes. As we move before them and our point of view changes the light catches brushstrokes, pigments and metallic surfaces, and the images alternately come into existence and dissolve into their surroundings; an effect that photographic reproduction cannot possibly capture. They seem to embody a complex matrix of past and present, artificiality and reality, memory and history. For the artist they are personal explorations of imagery and the image-making process. They enact a balancing act in which the overt subject (the figures) and the implicit subject (the question of painting and what it might mean) co-exist.

German-born Otto-Knapp has been based in London since 1995. In the last five years, working with watercolour, she has developed an international reputation for her paintings of landscapes and figures. Otto-Knapp’s subjects have included botanic gardens and glasshouses, Los Angeles cityscapes, Las Vegas hotels, Busby Berkeley musicals, and performers such as PJ Harvey and Patti Smith, subjects in which a tension between artifice and reality is both manifest and blurred. This tension is a key theme of Otto-Knapp’s work. While it might seem that she is drawn to highly romantic subjects she is interested in (partially) defusing this romantic aura. Her work thus negotiates a series of contradictions. It is at once intense and ‘cool’, simultaneously traditional and concerned with the process of its own production, both formal and mysterious.

Her recent work represents a departure. While her subjects suggest a continuation of earlier themes, she has transformed the appearance of her work by producing almost monochrome paintings in silver and gold, colours associated with sophistication and spectacle, but also illusion and artificiality.

Otto-Knapp’s recent paintings are derived from found photographs documenting dance performances. A number are inspired by images of Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, which was written for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes and first performed in Paris in 1923 with costumes by the Russian painter Natalia Goncharova. Les Noces was choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska and it was the compositions that she developed, coupled with Goncharova’s simple and striking costumes, that attracted Otto-Knapp. Nijinska’s choreography was described as ‘austere’ and ‘monumental’ and the movements of the dancers – stilled in the photographs that Otto-Knapp works from – create powerful archetypal statements.

However, although these paintings may take dance as their subject, they are not about dance. The formal, abstract, ritual aspects of ballet are translated in the painting process into formal, abstract pictorial statements; they provide a framework within which the artist can develop a dialogue with her materials. Thus her titles usually offer generic descriptions of the imagery, rather than identifying specific sources or hinting at a narrative. Nonetheless, these images, in which figures reach out for each other, lean together, or enact stylized gestures and expressions, do retain the ability to convey a sense of human drama. It is this tension that makes them so compelling.

For this series of paintings Otto-Knapp has worked from production photographs (often themselves mediated by photocopying or over-painting). However, in these works one sees a curious reversal taking place: the images retreat beyond the source photographs and approach the condition of the costume designs that preceded them. In part this is due to the reduced technique Otto-Knapp has used. In contrast to her highly textured earlier work, in which paint is drawn, brushed, poured, dripped, splashed and washed, many of these new paintings display a hard, flat, graphic style. Her use of silver and gold paint enhances this, creating an impersonal, metallic surface.

Watercolour is a medium that, in Britain especially, has a venerable history and contested status. While Otto-Knapp is familiar with British artists such as Turner, Girtin, Blake and Rossetti her decision to work in watercolour was prompted not by a desire to engage with the history and traditions of the medium, but by a process of formal experimentation. Working on prepared canvas instead of paper allows her to use the paint in a new way: rather than soaking into the ground it pools on and drips down the surface. Otto-Knapp has explained:

...painting on canvas enables me to rework the picture in order to connect the drawn and painted elements, and to develop a complex space. The transparency and ephemeral nature of the watercolours makes the picture appear as if it is floating on the surface of the canvas. As the paint dries, shapes and edges develop which I can’t necessarily predict beforehand, but which I then react to. Watercolours dry quickly so I almost have to act on the offensive in working with this residue and the ‘coincidences’...

The finished painting is thus as much about the process of arriving at a resolution of pictorial incident as it is about articulating an idea about a person, place or event. However, process also creates meaning. In repeatedly washing down her images, reworking them layer by layer, Otto-Knapp is able to create pictures of great translucency, delicacy and beauty. But they can also imply violence, obliteration or decay. In some works it is as if the artist has attempted to erase the subject, leaving just a trace. Thus the Queen of the Night (after Bakst) 2005 and other figures seem to be on the verge of disappearing, as if fading back into history.

Text by Ben Tufnell

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