Klaus Wolf Knoebel was born on December 31, 1940, and spent his childhood near Dresden before his family moved to Mainz in 1950. From 1962 to 1964, he took courses at the Werkkunstschule in Darmstadt, which were based on the concept of the Bauhaus preliminary course developed by Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy. There he also met Rainer Giese, and both took on the first name Imi, an abbreviation that the friends used to call each other when saying goodbye. Fascinated by the personality of their teacher Joseph Beuys, the duo transferred to the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1964, where they wanted to set themselves apart from the other Beuys students. Even then, Knoebel was already exploring the relationship between space, substrate, and color in analytical series. The reduction to the elementary coordinates of painting is indebted to his second great role model, Kazimir Malevich. In the final phase of his purist line paintings, light projections, and white paintings (1972–1975), Knoebel used color for the first time in 1974.
The present work belongs to the group of works entitled "Portraits," which was created between 1991 and 1995. In these works, Knoebel is primarily concerned with the interplay and autonomous effect of color, form, material, and spatial situation. "[...] Imi Knoebel is one of the most radical and consistent abstract artists of today. [...] in Knoebel's work, radicalism and consistency combine to form a balanced unity that is constantly being put to the test." (quoted from: Imi Knoebel. Retrospective 1968–1996, exhibition catalog, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Ostfildern 1996, p. 292).
In addition to solo exhibitions in museums, including in Düsseldorf in 1975, Winterthur and Bonn in 1983, and Hamburg in 1992 and 2003, Knoebel has also been represented in important group exhibitions such as documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8. In 1996, a major retrospective of his work took place at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. [LB/KA]