NGL, I’ve never been as interested as I perhaps empirically should be in Imi Knoebel’s work, and that’s on me. I feel like it requires more understanding or immersion in the context of 80s German painting discourse than I’ve been willing to take on. And so frankly I only end up with an auction’s-eye view of it, which has never thrilled me.
Which is all a setup to still fail to explain how smitten I am by this wack Table from 1987. What even is going on here, table-wise? But the multiple side and underside views at Grisebach show an extraordinary construction, a weird mix of kludgy and precise, where dimensional lumber legs are mitered to the precise, weird angles they’re set into, and the whole thing looks painted by brush, and held together with tensioning keys?
This is not a table, but a table-shaped painting and/or sculpture. And though it was produced as an edition of 25 [?!] for a show at the Van Abbemuseum [?! love those guys], it’s very much a handmade object. What a wild combination of attributes for a glitched out Memphis monster that somehow feels very much of its time?
[A few minutes later update] Am I high, or is this table the shape of a then-not-yet-reunited Germany?
[Later in the day update] OK, no. The table is properly from 1982/87. I went lowkey mad searching for a Knoebel solo show at Van Abbemuseum in 1987, but it was in 1982. It included the second installation of Ghent Room, 1980, Knoebel’s pivotal exploration of color and space which, for the purposes of this post, looks like 115 monochrome tabletops of various dimensions. It was shown later that year at Documenta 7, and by 1987, had been installed three more times, including at Dia.
Anyway, Table was an edition from the 1982 show. Tafel ed. 2/25 sold in 2023, in The Hague, with a stamp and a handwritten date from 1983. It was purportedly acquired in 1987, at the artist’s solo show at the Van Abbemuseum which, again, did not happen. The edition number of the Van Abbemuseum’s own example of Table is not known, but it is listed as a 1982 work, produced in 1987.
Perhaps it took the Van Abbemuseum a while to complete production of their edition. Perhaps it took the Van Abbemuseum community a while to collect all 25 tables. But this table comes from 1982, and at least one example was signed and dated by Knoebel himself.
In 2014, Knoebel produced three new tables, which jigsaw together in two or three pieces, which he showed at Galerie Bärbel Grässlin in Frankfurt. With these works, “Knoebel returns to one of his works from 1982, a table that he had produced in an edition of 25 for a solo show at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven at the time.” According to the Contemporary Art Library version of the press release the tables are “meant to be used,” and come in editions of 3+2AP, or 15 tables made of 40 smaller tables.
Lot 764, 5 June 2026, Imi Knoebel, Table, 1987, est. EUR 8-12,000 [grisebach]
Previously, Van Abbemuseum-related:
Piet Mondrian Stage Sets with 1980s update
Shanzhai Vanabbemuseum by Li Mu
SUPERFLEX free Sol Lewitt sculptures at Van Abbemuseum