Yossi Milo is pleased to present Le Sacre Du Printemps, an exhibition of new paintings by Pierre Knop (b. 1982, Nancy, France). For his third solo exhibition with the gallery, Knop turns his attention entirely to landscapes, deepening his engagement within a practice that has long moved between observation, memory, and invention. “My paintings don’t depict an external reality, but rather an inner one,” he explains. Drawing from photographs, lived experience, and art historical references, Knop develops compositions through an ongoing dialogue between material, gesture, and perception, allowing each painting to arrive at its own internal logic.
Although partially inspired by the subject matter within his paintings, the title, Le Sacre Du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), is also influenced by Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 composition of the same name. Knop often abstains from using electronics during his time in the studio, instead playing vinyl records from his personal collection, which includes jazz, hip hop, and classical music. The Rite of Spring became a recurring accompaniment as he made these paintings, sometimes playing it multiple times in a single day. Knop was drawn to the composition’s provocative dissonance, and to the way its shifts in energy could establish a mood while he constructed his expansive landscapes.
One of the most significant changes in this body of work is the absence of figures. Across landscapes comprised of towering mountains, rustling trees, and flowing water, Knop removes the human presence that has often inhabited his paintings. He describes the figure as a sort of “proxy” through which a viewer can enter an image, imagining and ultimately constructing a narrative around what they see. In doing so, he suggests; we tend to “humanize” nature. Here, Knop removes that entry point, allowing the landscape to operate on its own terms. “Landscapes give me the potential to create a visual symphony of appearances through rhythm and texture,” Knop explains. For him, these landscapes are “less about real places and more about states of perception and the duality of fiction and non-fiction,” allowing them to move toward “the exaggerated, the artificial, or the dream-like.”
Developed over the course of a year, the 11 new works in this exhibition vary in scale and reflect Knop’s process-driven approach to painting. Working across oil, acrylic, ink, oil stick, pastel, crayon, and pencil, he begins with potential motifs, sketches, and underpainting, but not with a predetermined image. “Painting always comes first” he explains. His compositions instead emerge through an organic process in which, as he puts it, “anything can happen.”
Mistakes are integral to this approach, something Knop describes as the “third hand of painting.” Rather than attempting to maintain complete control over the direction of an image, he allows unexpected developments to alter it. This process can be laborious and unpredictable, but this uncertainty is also what excites him. It provides an opportunity, in Knop’s words, to “trick himself” out of a preplanned routine or preconceived notion of what the painting should become.
Throughout Le Sacre Du Printemps, Knop continues to explore painting’s capacity to hold opposing conditions without requiring their resolution: light and darkness, calm and energy, and order and chaos. This tension extends to the landscapes themselves, which move between recognition and estrangement. “My works should evoke both the familiar and the alien, like imagined memories of a past that never truly existed.”
Pierre Knop has presented solo exhibitions across the globe, including at Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark; Choi&Lager Gallery, Seoul, Korea and Cologne, Germany; and Lyles and King, New York, NY. Work by the artist has been included in group exhibitions at Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland; Spazio Amanita, New York, NY; Ruttkowski68 Gallery, Cologne, Germany, and Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Knop is represented by Pilar Corrias in London, UK, and lives in Cologne, Germany.
