Questions of Travel
Silke Otto-Knapp — Questions of Travel presented parallel exhibitions by the artist in two decidedly different locations: at the Kunsthalle Wien’s Karlsplatz pavilion in the center of Vienna and on Fogo Island off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada.
about Questions of Travel
For these exhibitions Otto-Knapp, a German native now based in Los Angeles, selected a group of paintings from the past three years. The artist makes her black and white monochromes by applying watercolour to primed canvas. Otto-Knapp combines motifs of landscape and decorative painting with a distinctive technique of layered and erased coats of paint to create works that are called by the LA Times as “visually elusive as quicksilver.”
In the exhibition Questions of Travel (Wien), Otto-Knapp’s paintings were placed alongside drawings by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911), who organised his works as a scenography of expressive self-interrogation based on the motif of the stage.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition is the catalogue Silke Otto-Knapp — Questions of Travel (2014), a co-production of Fogo Island Arts, Kunsthalle Wien and Sternberg Press. The book features essays by Vanessa Joan Müller and Susan Morgan and Silke Otto-Knapp interviewed by Nicolaus Schafhausen.
