Imi Knoebel: Enduros

In Enduros, part two of the two-part exhibition the Deutsche Guggenheim dedicates to artist Imi Knoebel, more than 200 collages, drawings, photographs, and prints from the Deutsche Bank Collection offer fascinating insight into the development of the artist’s nonobjective formal vocabulary. Ranging from early photographs and studies to his most recent works, Enduros also documents a part of the bank’s collecting history: for 23 years, it has continuously followed, purchased, and presented Knoebel’s work.

Together with the Neue Nationalgalerie, which is concurrently showing the Knoebel exhibition Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe . . ., the Deutsche Guggenheim celebrates this exceptional artist’s ability to transform the fundamentals of his art into something new time and again. Likewise, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was built to house Guggenheim’s collection of largely nonobjective art. This year marks the 50th anniversary of this modernist masterwork, and in celebration, the Guggenheim is presenting the first major showing of the architect’s work in the museum, one of his most groundbreaking achievements. As these encounters with Knoebel and Wright demonstrate, modernism can still be experienced today as an intellectual, sensuous, and controversial adventure.

The exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin is being mounted in close collaboration with the artist and in cooperation with the Neue Nationalgalerie, where Imi’s Knoebel installation Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe… is opening at the same time.