Basel, where it is most noble. Unspoilt squares, narrow streets through which the humanistic spirit wafts like an eternal promise. A few steps to the Minster. A few steps to the former gallery of the legendary art dealer Ernst Beyeler. That’s where Carlo Knoell has his gallery.
Not far from his father’s frame shop, where museum people from all over the world have historical frames for their treasures shown to them. And fans of old books have their paradise in the famous antiquarian bookshop a few doors down. Founding a company couldn’t be any better.
The agile young man has been in the business for a handful of years. After an apprenticeship at the auction houses Koller in Zurich and Grisebach in Berlin and at the Michael Werner Gallery in London, he set up his own business as a dealer with a solid statement on constructive-concrete art.
Max Bill, Karl Gerstner, Verena Loewensberg, Georges Vantongerloo, Josef Albers – they are among the reliable pillars of the program. They also shape an art dealing style that is more oriented towards proven quality than assertion and experimentation.
In accordance with the dignified ambience, the exhibitions at the Baseler Luftgässlein always resemble a well-kept museum for modern and contemporary art. And it was inevitable that the gallery attracted attention right from the start.
Knoell had already been invited to participate in the choosy Art Basel art fair in the pre-Corona period. In the meantime, he has his permanent place there. And the fact that he appears at Art Basel in Miami Beach is also part of the tradition.
In the meantime, Carlo Knoell has expanded the artist set considerably and further sharpened his profile. With Sonja Sekula, Irène Zurkinden, Meret Oppenheim, Agnes Martin and Miriam Cahn, the spectrum has not only become more feminine, but has also been significantly expanded artistically. When Knoell rummages through the depots of modern art history, it is never without a discovery.
Meyer Riegger, the friendly gallery owners in Karlsruhe and Berlin, have now awakened Knoell’s interest in the work of the almost forgotten Horst Antes. And a visit to the Italian studio of the 86-year-old painter has now made possible a concentrated exhibition that is like a journey through time to the infinitely distant 1960s.
Antes used to be a “star” when the name of success wasn’t even around. With his “cephalopods” – disembodied large skulls that seem to sit like helmets on hidden monsters – he had created an extremely memorable identity feature.
The contemporary audience stood in front of the humanoid creatures, alienated and rather helpless, that was at the beginning of the 1960s. And because there were no computer games and hardly any extraterrestrials in the cinema, the species seemed like an incomprehensible message from the afterlife of art.
What kind of strangely disciplined painting was it that obviously wanted nothing to do with the dominant post-war controversy over abstraction? For it was not entirely clear whether Antes’ figurative obsession should be assigned to the representational or the non-representational class.
One thought of Picasso, whose post-Cubist figuration oscillated so indecisively between realistic classicism and surreal deformation. But unlike the Spanish master of self-portrayal, the Karlsruhe painter Antes always remained in the background – unrecognized and almost unknown to the following generation.
Not that there was a lack of exhibitions, at least up until the 1980s. The Antes collectors also ensured moderate but constant price increases. Only the artist avoided every opportunity to make a grand entrance, allowed profiles of the bald type to be forged into edition objects. Even today, the sculptures stand here and there in the front gardens, rusting alone as a reminder of the hot season they once had.
Horst Antes did not comment on the boom. He wrote no manifesto, no dark, murmuring essay like Ernst Wilhelm Nay, no pedagogical instruction like Willi Baumeister, no four-volume memoirs like Karl Otto Götz. There are no or hardly any interviews with him. Texts about him are all considerably advanced in age. And anyone who has seen the professor at the Karlsruhe Art Academy will remember a gnarly, nice, rather lazy teacher.
So it is entirely in line with the logic of the permanently accelerated art world that many didn’t even notice that the painter had long been somewhere else, that he was now interested in hands and that he soon turned his head diagrams by 90 degrees in order to look into their stupid, demonic faces and later to get her off the stage altogether. For this he designed houses in the manner of building blocks and began to rearrange the rooms with all sorts of equipment, with pipes, ladders and stairs.
The Antes story about it hasn’t become more harmless or playful. And the plant never revealed its secret. To this day, something strangely repellent emanates from these pictures, as if the pictures wanted to keep their viewers at a distance. And the magic, kept immensely fresh, still comes with a feeling of unsettling chill.
But what can be seen much more clearly in retrospect is the painterly sophistication, the highly sensitive use of color, which becomes all the more important the simpler the pictorial narrative is, the tidier the pictorial space appears, the more unintentional the pictorial theme appears.
It is not wrong to say that Antes’ work has an existentialist foundation. “Loneliness”, “homelessness”, “thrown away”, “contained” – the pictures served as seductive illustrations of the fashionable idiom of the early Federal Republic. But that’s not all that can be said about her. Perhaps they really first had to become historical in order to recognize what makes them imperishable: painterly culture, the interplay of light and shadow, the fine values in the dominant color climate.
Anyone remember the time? Fireworks of color all around, triumphs of abstraction, triumphs of pop art. Horst Antes opts for the achromatic in the midst of the colourful, for painterly minimalism. When you stand in front of the 1960s pictures at Knoell in Basel, you are quite sure that such minimalism has lost none of its fascinating austerity.
“Horst Antes. Pictures 1967–1973”, until March 25, Galerie Knoell, Basel
