Artist: Karin Kneffel

Dirimart presents A House in Hampstead, Karin Kneffel’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring the artist’s new body of work centred on the Isokon Flats – the cultural landmark and one of the pioneering examples of the Bauhaus architecture in Britain.

Karin Kneffel is renowned for her hyperrealist compositions, which skilfully reconstruct elements of academic painting long dismantled by modernism. Through appropriation and alienation, she interweaves contemporary issues with present-day realities. Her meticulous brushstrokes result in visually multilayered compositions, enriched by reflections and illusions that deepen the aesthetic experience on the canvas. Kneffel deliberately chooses compositions that prompt reflection on how cultural and political histories are perceived. By drawing attention to overlooked and under-researched narratives of pioneering women, she subtly builds a visual lexicon that challenges established modes of storytelling.

Kneffel’s exhibitions often serve as platforms for her painterly interpretations of iconic architectural buildings and interiors. She treats these spaces as frameworks that allow art to transcend the limits of reality. Through fabricated memories, conjured with objects and ghostly figures, she establishes pseudo connections.

For this exhibition, Kneffel turns her attention to the Isokon Flats, designed by Wells Coates for Jack & Molly Pritchard. Once a hub for intellectual life in North London during the 1930s and 40s, its notable residents included Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy, whose legacies Kneffel has previously explored in her works. The novelist Agatha Christie and her husband also resided there, while sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth – whose memories and works are central to the exhibition – were among its frequent visitors. Viewed through Kneffel’s studio gaze, A House in Hampstead invites us to re-imagine a fragmented past, discernible only through undated scenes. These elusive paintings offer a photographic gaze upon the building’s history and its celebrated residents and visitors, juxtaposing archival fragments with Kneffel’s signature figures and gestures.

The exhibition also showcases Karin Kneffel’s monumental still-life compositions, which stand as a testament to her artistic statement. Among these are new works depicting large-scale grapes and tulips, subjects through which Kneffel boldly embraces the decorative as a deliberate challenge to its traditional exclusion from academic strictures.

Alongside these still-lifes, the exhibition includes a selection of photographic works that reflect the artist’s playful engagement with the concept of reality, demonstrating her joyful exploration of illusion and perception. By masterfully manipulating imagery, Kneffel creates a sense of intrigue and wonder.

Completing the exhibition is a series of watercolour-on-screenprints that revisit Kneffel’s memory-laden compositions from earlier in her career. These works serve as a bridge to her past artistic journeys, offering a nuanced reinterpretation of recurring themes and motifs.

Through this diverse selection of works, A House in Hampstead provides a comprehensive view of Kneffel’s multifaceted practice, showcasing her technical virtuosity, intellectual depth and curiosity, and her unwavering commitment to expand the possibilities of painting.