Characterized by complex narrative levels, Karin Kneffel's works also possess an outstanding technical mastery, especially as she is able to make time and space overlap in her works. Compositions contain a multitude of references to art history architecture, combining them to form complex pictorial structures characterized by an interplay of reality and illusion, past and present, as well as concreteness and alienation. Karin Kneffel devoted a series of works, of which the present work is one, to the extensive Lange art collection in Krefeld. The collection of the silk manufacturer Hermann Lange (1874-1942) and his wife Mary (1875-1964) had been compiled mainly in the 1920s and comprised top-quality works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marc Chagall and Franz Marc, to name just a few. Most of the well-known works are part of renowned museum collections today. However, they only reflect a small part of this important collection. Today it is assumed that around 300 paintings and sculptures, as well as scores of prints and drawings were part of it. The collection was on display in a house that Mies van der Rohehad designed for the Lange family. A reconstruction of the collection was possible on basis of black-and-white photographs, which first appeared in the estate of Mies' student Eduard Ludwig in 2005. These photos provided the basis for a whole series of works in which Karin Kneffel artistically reconstructs the Lange art collection. In the present composition, she reproduces the spatial situation of the Lange family's dining room in the fascinating grisaille technique and with a certain blurriness, putting Marc Chagall’s "The Holy Cabman" at the center of the composition. Knowing Chagall's work from the black-and-white photograph, she can only reproduce it that same way. Studying as many original works from the Lange Collection as possible, she documents her research results on canvas, resulting in a series of paintings in which the artworks are framed or crossed out with thick red brushstrokes on the painted photo template. In her fascinating, hyper-realistic style, she manages to let the thick layer of paint on the photo bulge on the canvas. Kneffel came across Marc Chaggel's work "The Holy Cabman" in Frankfurt, where she captured it in its museum environment, however, not without adding alterations. While the saint hangs upside down in the museum, she rotates the work exactly as required by the historical model. Ever since the artist had an opportunity to view the original works, all paintings got their colors back, emerging in the present from the photographically recorded memory. Accordingly, the work series documents itself, gradually lifting the veil of time, visualizing the path to knowledge. [SM]