2019 Catalogue Archive

To create her quietly luminous works, LA-based painter Silke Otto-Knapp adds subtle washes of watercolor to canvas, and then carefully removes them. Her subject matter varies widely, though her works are unified by their monochromatic color palette (most often created with watercolor on canvas) and atmospheric surface quality. In Landscape With Rainbow (2), the color is drained from the landscape, and what is left is a shimmering geometric composition, a tonal study of mood and distance that is grounded in the history of landscape painting. Otto-Knapp’s work has been shown throughout the US and Europe, and her work is in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Belvedere Museum, Vienna; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; and SFMoMA, San Francisco, among others.