When Infinity Begins

By Martina Dobbe

The exhibition Imi Knoebel: Projektion (fig. 1) at the Projektbüro DFI e.V. at Eiskellerberg in Düsseldorf presented Knoebel’s early experimental series of the same title from 1968–74, which grew out of light projections in interior and exterior spaces documented in numerous photographs. The exhibition also included the single video work from this early series, Projektion X (1972), which documents Knoebel’s light projections. In addition, it presented large-format inkjet prints from 2026 that draw on the same photographic material while developing a visual aesthetic of their own. These works put our understanding of photography in the early twenty-first century to the test.

Between these two poles, the exhibition¹ examined the status of photography as both medium and material in Knoebel’s artistic thinking, as well as the role and relevance of Knoebel’s photographic archive.²

These two questions provide the guiding thread for the reflections that follow. At the center of the presentation at Eiskellerberg stood Imi Knoebel’s Archivschrank³ containing 152 folders and 5,799 photographs of his interior and exterior projections from 1968–74 (fig. 2). Conceived as a sculptural object, the cabinet also serves as the meticulously ordered archive of his originally ephemeral light projections and light installations.

The structure of the archive becomes legible through the body of contact sheets, which are kept in binders (fig. 3) and were available for consultation during the exhibition. Together with the corresponding handwritten notes, which record which contact images were rejected and which were selected as final 24 × 30 cm prints for inclusion in the Archivschrank, the binders form a kind of inventory, organized according to the seventeen different interior and exterior projections that were documented photographically.

This inventory can also be consulted to reconstruct the photographic sequences from which individual prints used in photographic tableaux in exhibitions derive—as, for example, in the presentation at Eiskellerberg (fig. 4).⁴ Arranged in blocks, these prints are assembled into an abstract, dynamic drawing in light.

The genesis of the series Projektion reaches back to the beginnings of Knoebel’s artistic development. Imi Knoebel initially studied at the Werkkunstschule Darmstadt, where, at the time, preliminary courses were taught following the models developed by Itten and Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus. Photography in Darmstadt was taught by Kilian Breier, who had himself studied with Otto Steinert in Saarbrücken and was for a time involved with the neue gruppe saar. Breier is regarded as one of the representatives of Concrete Photography, whose practitioners used photography to create predominantly non-representational images characterized by graphic structures and clearly articulated configurations of light and shadow.⁵

Knoebel would later draw on the impulses and skills acquired during his studies in Darmstadt at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied from 1964 onward—albeit not from an “applied” perspective, but in the course of an independent artistic development. As is well known, he spent only a short time at the Kunstakademie in the “Angewandte Graphik” (Applied Graphics) class, headed by Walter Breker. Drawing and graphic work continued to form part of his practice, though no longer within the propaedeutic framework of the Darmstadt curriculum. Photographic practice, moreover, did not yet have an institutional base in Düsseldorf in 1964, although Hilla Becher, during her studies with Breker (1958–61), had been entrusted with setting up an initial photography workshop. Imi Knoebel does not recall having been aware, during his studies in Düsseldorf, that this workshop—apparently equipped “only” with a black-and-white darkroom—existed.

During his time in Darmstadt, by contrast, he had taken a strong interest in the newly established color darkroom, where, as is well known, work has to be carried out in complete darkness. One might surmise that his work with projections in darkened interior spaces drew on this experience in Darmstadt.

Together with Imi Giese, with whom he had moved from Darmstadt to Düsseldorf,⁶ Knoebel then “hung around with Beuys,” as he recounted in conversation with Johannes Stüttgen, until Beuys gave the two of them a studio of their own, Room 19, and let them “simply get on with it”⁷—for the geometric-abstract approaches pursued by Imi & Imi apparently had little to do with what was being debated in Room 20, Beuys’s actual class.

During his years at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Knoebel produced the so-called Linienbilder (line paintings; fig. 5)⁸ as his first fully realized body of work: white-grounded panel paintings⁹ onto which he applied rigorous grid structures using a ruling pen, black ink, and a ruler, characterized by a regular succession of predominantly vertical lines. From one picture to the next, the width of the white and black lines could vary, while within each individual picture the intervals always remained constant. These works were concerned not with composition within the picture, but with a systematic, repeatedly renewed experimental investigation of the relationship between line and plane in and as the picture. Other Linienbilder (fig. 6) used the black lines more sparingly, placing the ground and the linear grid in a repeat structure that extended beyond the boundaries of the picture. The attempt to reduce the picture to its utmost formal limit was ultimately extended to the empty, multipart picture. The “white emptiness […] now acquired […] a positive value that directed attention toward other qualities of the panel painting: the material, the surface, and the volume; the dimensions and angles; and, not least, the relationship of the pictures to the wall and to space.”¹⁰

The Projektionsbildgrößen (overpaintings in white of projections of differently sized picture formats onto the wall) and the series Projektionen (projections of lines, circles, and figures, photographed in black and white and reproduced as 24 × 30 cm prints)¹³ were shown in a number of important exhibitions between 1968 and 1974. The Projektionsbildgrößen, for example, were presented at Galerie art & project in Amsterdam and documented in Bulletin no. 31 of 1970 (figs. 8a, 8b).

Knoebel’s solo exhibition at the Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven (figs. 9a, 9b, 9c) brought Projektionsbildgröße into dialogue with the display window later made iconic by Blinky Palermo; in Knoebel’s installation, the glass frontage of the Kabinett can almost be understood as a monumental slide.¹⁴ In 1971, Knoebel participated in Prospect 71: Projection at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (figs. 10a, 10b).¹⁵

In 1972, projections were exhibited for the first time as a slide installation in the gallery space, together with photographs of the interior and exterior projections, as part of the solo exhibition Projektion 4/1-11, 5/1-11 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (fig. 11).

In 1972, Knoebel finally expanded the concept of the exterior projections by undertaking what remained a singular experiment with the moving image: together with Gerry Schum, he produced the video Projektion X (figs. 12a, 12b) for Schum’s videogalerie schum. Using a high-intensity projector and a multidiode camera,¹⁶ both mounted on the roof of Gerry Schum’s converted motorhome, the two drove through Darmstadt at night, recording the traces of light left by the projected X in the urban space. “The unedited tape owes its wealth of optical impressions to the varying speed of the vehicle, the layout of the streets, the nature of the projection surface, as well as its distance from and angle to the direction of travel.”¹⁷ The video-specific trailing effects produced in low light also appear as distinctive blurs and movements of light.

The sequence of the early works from 1966/68 to 1974 can thus, as just demonstrated, be reconstructed step by step, emphasizing the internal coherence among Knoebel’s groups of works, distinct in material and medium (panel paintings, picture objects, installations, projections, photographs). Nevertheless, one should be wary of imposing a linear developmental logic on his work. Such a reading would contradict the open-ended conception of his work that Knoebel has pursued from the outset—and continues to pursue to this day.

Rather than unfolding chronologically and linearly, his work develops in series or groups whose central parameters (support, material, color/application of color, serial arrangement, among others) are investigated systematically, but never conclusively. Completeness is not the aim of this system.¹⁸ Asked during a studio visit on May 12, 2026, how one decides when work on an extensive group is complete even though not all possible variants have been fully articulated, Imi Knoebel replied: “when infinity begins” (“wenn die Unendlichkeit beginnt”).

“Modulations” and “reprises” at a later point in time and within a different material or medial setting thus remain possible.¹⁹ Any overly simple classification of his works within the artistic movements of his time is likewise at odds with this open-ended conception of his work—for example, when the grids of the Linienbilder are related to the phenomenon of the grid in American painting, or the almost monochrome white panels are compared with Rauschenberg’s White Paintings of the 1950s.²⁰ In particular, characterizing Knoebel’s work as Minimalist falls short.

On the other hand, it may seem surprising that Knoebel’s engagement with photography and the photographic has rarely been given due recognition in subsequent art criticism or art-historical writing—even though his works were highly pertinent within the intermedial exhibition contexts of the late 1960s referred to above and could have been recognized as such in the context of emerging Conceptual Art and its use of photography.

Exceptions prove the rule: Johannes Stüttgen, in particular, retrospectively emphasized the radicality and significance of Knoebel’s photographic work in 1994,²¹ at a time when Knoebel’s photographs had once again been shown, for example, in the retrospective 1968–1996 at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, yet had attracted little public response.²² One may surmise that this was due, not least, to the fact that the so-called Düsseldorf School of Photography, with its markedly different understanding of photography, dominated contemporary debates over photography’s status as fine art.

Even in more recent anthologies on the art of projection, the history of the slide installation, or the uses of photography in art, references to Knoebel’s series Projektionen remain comparatively rare.²³

All the more fascinating, then, is to trace within Knoebel’s oeuvre how—and in how many different ways—the artist returned to the Projektionen in later groups of works. In doing so, it becomes clear how central the body of photographs has remained to his oeuvre as a whole, even though he no longer worked with the camera himself after 1974. Equally fascinating is to follow how the 2026 project Imi Knoebel: Projektion builds a bridge from the photographic and intermedial discourses of the 1960s and 1970s to the questions posed today by Towards Photography.

From a technical and archival perspective, the challenges of digitization necessarily come into play. Projektion X was transferred to a digital format that allows for large-scale, wall-filling presentation and thereby enables a different mode of reception from that of the original monitor display. Through the digitization of the contact sheets, Knoebel’s collection of 5,799 analog photographs in Archivschrank—which since the 1960s has deliberately occupied an intermediate position between artistic object and working archive—is opened up to scholarly inquiry in art history and the history of photography. The debates concerning the preservation of photographic heritage and the challenges involved in archiving artists’ collections can thus be studied here in exemplary fashion.

The digitization of selected photographs, together with the technical expertise brought to bear by specialists in the latest digitization processes and developments in inkjet printing, enabled Knoebel in 2026 to see his 24 × 30 cm analog photographs from the 1960s and 1970s anew as 160 × 240 cm inkjet prints (fig. 13).