Marcus Knupp - From Where to When

Arndt & Partner Zurich is featuring the emerging painter Marcus Knupp. Born 1978 in Germany to American parents, the artist spent part of his childhood in Germany, whereby his exposures and understandings of the US were primarily through the lenses of the military environment and through television programming sent to him by relatives in the US. Marcus was always in the middle and armed with a mass of cultural pop imagery. This found imagery is used in a paste like application to create landscapes and narrative scenes that exist in layered abstract lines of thought. His source material include cinema, both contemporary and historical, American cable television, fashion adds, comic books, cartoon shows, album cover art, and imagery pulled with naturalistic settings and forms, working class activity, both contemporary and historical architectural development, mythology, sexual identity, and American history.

The new body of works that Marcus Knupp is currently showing with Arndt & Partner Zurich titled “From Where to When” is drawn from themes found in two recent films, such as “Burnt Money” (2000, Director Marcelo Pineyro) and “Pride and Prejudice” (2005, Director Joe Wright), based on a novel by Jane Austin. Though the plots themselves are not specifically adapted by the artist, the scenes and tales of love and struggle were used as a point of departure. What may read as a chaotic narrative about love, sex, ceremony, and historical molds, is based on the artist’s intuitive response to multiple visual references. Visual elements from both films are used in the body of work (the country house from “Pride and Prejudice” in Habitat, or the two lovers having their last embrace in From Where to When II). More interested in the foggy zone of psychological response rather then in premeditated commentary, the artist allows the work to dictate its own creation, thus evoking pictorial zones with multiple interpretations.

All of this is done with a light hand, and heart, with a playful sensibility and at the same time with a rare self-confidence. Marcus Knupp is truly a master of his canvas.

Marcus Knupp - From Where to When