Artist: Jakob Lena Knebl

Jakob Lena Knebl’s work explores how art and design are shaped by spatial, social, and political conditions, both historically and in the present. Her installations offer a sensual invitation: they awaken desire and create spaces in which it can take shape. Colour, texture, and the arrangement of objects draw the viewer into relationships that reveal how people and things shape one another—and how identity is formed between them.

Knebl treats the histories of art and design as living material, open to being handled, altered, and rearranged. Her practice brings together diverse techniques, materials, and forms. Through often humorous acts of appropriation, she transforms familiar works, inserts her own face, or constructs new figures from fragments of different sculptures. Changes in scale, context, and authorship give these forms new meanings while keeping their sources visible.

Appropriation and transformation are also ways of sharing knowledge. At a time when historical contexts are easily overlooked or forgotten, Knebl’s work brings art and design history, together with the social and cultural phenomena that shaped them, into the present. These histories become tangible through materials, bodies, and spatial arrangements.

Her sculptures are positioned within carefully composed settings that often recall domestic interiors. Furniture, textiles, and sculptural forms establish relationships with one another, moving between the intimacy of a room and the public space of an exhibition. Elements of private life enter the gallery, while art takes on the familiarity and sensual appeal of objects we might live with.

Knebl gives art and design equal standing. This democratic approach allows everyday objects, decorative forms, and recognised artworks to contribute to the meaning of an installation. Moving between humour and sensuality, her work makes identity palpable as an ongoing process, shaped by what surrounds us, what we desire, and how we relate to the things in our lives.