Robert Knoke is the Berlin-based artist making blotchy black images of fashion and art's best love figures.
The Berlin-based, post-Expressionist artist Robert Knoke has an urgent interest: depicting his subjects in hardcore, kinetic squiggles with stoic intensity.
Armed with an insane aptitude for drawing, print-making and graphic design, Knoke creates artworks that radiate with erotic yearning, transgressive deviance and avant-garde gusto. Known for his visceral portraiture and bold mixed-media pieces, Knoke’s work features influential figures across the arts including Nicola Formichetti, Rick Owens,
Marc Jacobs, Bret Easton Ellis and
Terence Koh. Making the most innervating compositions from a sincere and affectionate place, his work explores pop-iconography from a darker, harder-edged angle.
Since his arrival on the global art scene in the early nineties (he flits between Berlin, London and NYC), Knoke has been carrying favour with the alternative fashion and music crowd, recognized for his blotchy, dark draftsmanship. He’s done countless portraits of legit celebs, fringey freaks and no-names alike and tends to show his stuff at avant-garde galleries, concept stores, art fairs and via pop-ups. With a recently released book Robert Knoke Black Material, his portraits are currently on display at V Group World.
i-D Online caught up with the kinetic Künstler in NYC’s Lower East Side…
What’s your work all about?
My genre is ‘Portraiture’, but I don’t define myself as a pure portraitist. My work is somewhere between drawing, painting and abstraction. It’s about figure without being figurative in a narrative sense.
What materials do you use to produce your work?
I use grease pencils, rolling-ball ink pens, Sharpies, tissue paper, a patchwork of cardboard pieces for a canvas and digital photos of my subjects that I tend to shoot myself.
Who’s on your radar right now?
Ai Wei Wei for his artistic integrity and intellectual courage.
What’s your favourite piece?
Hmm, my rendering of glam-punker Kembra Pfahler is especially poignant. It’s all about sexual politics and identity. Her portrait is perhaps my most auspicious work and I love her post-gender ‘pandrogynous’ aura which I expressed in dramatic pastiche and impasto. It took me longer to complete than the others and it is riddled with minutia, energy and austerity, I believe.
What is it about drawing other people that you’re so attracted to?
I love drawing other people because I value the interaction between myself and my subjects. Sometimes it is a deep relationship and other times it is just superficial but it always forces a kind of introspection and self-awareness that I really cherish.
http://zerozeroproject.com/
