Karin Kneffel: Haymatlos

Published on the occasion of Karin Kneffel’s exhibition Haymatlos at Dirimart (13 November 2020–17 January 2021), this trilingual catalogue explores themes of memory, displacement, and belonging. The 19 paintings on view establish a dialogue between Germany and Turkey through the notion of heimatlos—statelessness—probing how the past is recalled, altered, or transformed, leaving ambiguous traces in the present. Kneffel engages with the legacies of three exiled figures who lived in Istanbul: architect Bruno Taut, sculptor Rudolf Belling, and designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Their iconic works—the Bosphorus house designed by Taut, Belling’s İnönü sculpture and Skulptur 49, and Schütte-Lihotzky’s pioneering Frankfurter Küche—reappear under Kneffel’s painterly veil of drops, bubbles, and brushstrokes, questioning whether the world is ever truly familiar. Enriched with an essay by Julia Voss, along with studio and installation views, the catalogue situates Haymatlos within Kneffel’s broader practice and her celebrated retrospective STILL in Germany.

Text in English and Turkish and German.

Karin Kneffel (b. 1957, Marl) studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1981 and 1987. She currently teaches at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Among her recent solo and group exhibitions are at the Museum Jean de La Fontaine, France (1999); Monks House-Museum of Modern Art, Germany (2006); Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne (2008); Haus Esters, Germany (2009); Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany (2010); Museo De Arte Contemporáneo, Spain (2014); Barcelona Pavilion, Spain (2014); Fallstudien, Kathe Kollwitz Museum, Germany (2015); Works on Paper, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Germany (2015); and Bild im Bild, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2017). Karin Kneffel lives and works in Düsseldorf. Julia Voss is an honorary professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Art Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg. As part of her doctoral thesis on "Darwin's Pictures. Views of the Theory of Evolution, 1837-1874", she received fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Akademie Schloss Solitude from 2001 onward. From 2007 to 2017, she headed the art department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and from 2014 to 2017 she also became deputy head of the arts section. She taught art criticism at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and at Philipps University in Marburg. After 10 years of newspaper work, she returned to academia. Her work has been awarded prestigious prizes, including the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society and the Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose of the German Academy for Language and Poetry. In 2013, she curated the exhibition "1938. Art, Artists, Politics" at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on the history of abstraction, the connections between evolutionary theory and culture, restitution and provenance, theory and history of the art market and art criticism. Until January 2020, she wrote the art column "Ask Julia Voss" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Her book Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen: Hilma af Klint - Life and Work. Biography was published in 2020 and nominated for the non-fiction prize of the Leipzig Book Fair.