Silke Otto-Knapp: Buhnebilder

’Bühnenbilder’, the title of Silke Otto-Knapp’s recent exhibition in Minneapolis, are the fabricated views resulting from dressing sets. Neutral until they are costumed, they are like blank volumes awaiting a set designer’s meticulous treatment. The only colours in these works are black, grey, silver, and white. The artist’s palette and methodology, in which she applies a dark watercolour wash and then subtracts from it using absorptive implements, raising images from the dark, reflects the photograph’s urge to resurface something whose very location–in history, memory, desire–eludes the grasp of any image.